Becoming
by Arya's prayers
Summary: A jaded government agent is sent to deal with the actions of her rogue partner and discovers that some things are still worth fighting for. And that a life she never knew - thought left behind forever - may not be entirely beyond her reach. Mildly tweaked canon. Warning for darker treatments of the spy world. Book One begins; Part V (Ch 7 - 11) up.
1. I: The Greater Good

000: Preamble

A nearly thousand-word preamble to a fan fic? Yes, just to set some expectations and allow people to manage their personal preferences.

I only discovered fan fiction after the show's finale and embraced it to help cope with the loss (thanks, writers/enablers!). The finale really stuck with me and - as I considered the entirety of the series and to my complete surprise - this happened.

I don't want anyone to _accidentally_ waste their time on something they _should_ know they will dislike (deliberately doing so is another matter entirely). And it _is_ going to be a pretty dense, lengthy read with some known hot buttons / potential objections. So please indulge this one-time lengthy preamble before investing your time. Or skip ahead to the break if you know that you simply don't care!

Warnings / Here's a few things you should know (or maybe just forgot)...

Events: Mostly for any new Chucksters (Welcome, Friends!), via NetFlix or otherwise, obviously expect extensive spoilers and in no predictable order. For all prospective readers, this is still fundamentally a canon retelling - after a fashion - and I know many have tired of that. Although it does bend some events, happenings, backstory and motivations and fills in some blanks to fit my headcanon. I initially set out to explore canon events throughout the series in the context of that headcanon so the train never really jumps the canon track - although it may adhere more to the scenario rather than strictly to the events. Still, it is rarely intended as any kind of 'fix it' fic.

Pace: Positively _GLACIAL_.

Tone: Fully embraces the admittedly stylized / unrealistic elements and darker themes present in canon and inherent in the spy genre that CHUCK heavily leverages. It therefore tends to be fairly angsty and deemphasizes the more whimsical elements that some prefer. This darker approach also includes a wide spectrum of approaches to _THE_ hot-button topic: seductions...

About 'that'...: I _AGONIZED_ over the decisions related to seductions. I don't want to feed any kinks (no offense if that's your thing but...nope) nor do I want anything to come off as Pollyannaish or disingenuous. I DO want to be true to the underlying genre (warts and all), to be consistent in tone and, therefore, to acknowledge its too-casual, repercussion-free yet prominent usage in canon - all of which made it impossible to ignore seductions completely - while also trying to avoid the portrayal of such things as something blithely accepted. No choice here was made lightly but this means some portions of that spectrum will be unpleasant.

Caveat Emptor: Some of these elements are mere annoyances to some readers (pace, certain canon events) but others are known hot buttons. I have been reluctant to share this story having seen readers take great offense on principle to some elements and wanted to provide ample opportunity and the necessary information for those readers to opt out.

I now consider those who have strong aversions to any of these aspects to be sufficiently informed to make their own decisions and, perhaps naïvely, rely on the prospective reader's self-awareness and their ability to manage their own consumption. Having provided ample warning, I will try to avoid cluttering things up in the future with any additional commentary on story choices or blanket rebuttals and instead let the story tell the story from here on out.

And with that, as the good Captain says, I wash my hands of this weirdness. ;)

Acknowledgements

Because I am a control freak and crazy nervous about sharing (see Exhibit A above) this is technically unbetaed but thanks to everyone who has been supportive or offered their opinions when this was still in its early formative stages.

Extra special thanks with a cherry on top to the brilliant, talented and extremely gracious Steampunk!Chuckster for going the extra mile and offering to bounce ideas around - and let it be known, I have thrown some seriously wack ideas at her from a multiverse of possibilities. If any part is irredeemably offensive (as opposed to uncomfortable-but-story-appropriate), it is likely because I didn't heed her advice enough. A thousand thank-yous, Agent V. You are the best!

Logistics

The lengths of most installments should be around the 9k - 12k range in their entirety. This will make frequent updates unsustainable but I will try to update regularly. Due to extreme variation in scene/what-could-have-been-chapter lengths, some installments (like this first one) are single chapter 'long takes' while others are multi-scene/multi-chapter. They will be labelled so you know which to expect.

It is a bit 'front-loaded' due to extremely rich and dense S1 source material and a prologue that tries to set some rules of the universe, clarify expectations by example and even provides some early reveals to help with both. The prologue will be six chapters (usually roughly synonymous with 'scenes') spanning the first four installments/parts (published 'chapters') before we even get to Burbank.

For those few intrepid adventurers among you not yet dissuaded, willing to take the bad with the good and willing to forgive my missteps as I try to achieve a difficult balance, with no more ado...and that was a LOT of ado...let's remix this business...

Disclaimers / Easter Eggs

The author has derived no income or other profit from this work. No ownership of or claim to the characters or story of the television show _Chuck_ (referred to hereafter as CHUCK) or the movie _Tron_ is asserted or implied in this or any subsequent part. No ownership of or claim to Charles Schulz's _Peanuts_ characters is asserted or implied.

* * *

Becoming

PROLOGUE

"Choices"

"I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it." - Charles Dickens

* * *

Part I (Prologue): The Greater Good...

...in which a government agent contemplates recent events, her role in them and the unsavory career that has led her to this time and place before making a difficult decision...

Canon Reference: Contained within flashback elements of Chuck vs. The Baby (episode 5.08)

Contents: One super-sized chapter (Ch 1); 11,800 words, breaks indicate suggested rest points as we begin to delve into many of the elements warned of in the preamble

* * *

001: The Greater Good and Other Lies

Budapest, Hungary;

Sun Sept 16, 2007 12:56 am

Nicole Schroeder sat rigidly upright at the foot of the bed of her darkened hotel room. Her ankles were crossed and hands folded in her lap as she breathed in and out slowly, smoothly and deeply through her nose. The beautiful, blonde woman's heavily shadowed eyes were softly closed as she listened to the rain clattering against her window punctuated by the occasional flash of lightning visible through her eyelids and the subsequent soft rumble of distant thunder. She was taking advantage of this overdue moment of relative quiet to contemplate the convoluted events of the last several weeks.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to steer those thoughts away from the more existential questions she feared to face about the endless cycle of lies and violence her life had become and instead focus on more immediate concerns. Those immediate concerns currently consisting of both the contents of the repurposed gun case resting near her pillow and how much she hated the three men she held responsible for her current situation.

She resented the very idea that she in any way required a handler after over nine years in the CIA and six as a very successful and eventually highly autonomous field operative. She may have understood the thought process that could lead to distrust of her allegiances given recent events but she still couldn't believe a conclusion had been made that she was suddenly somehow unreliable in some way.

Had she known that the decision was less about the actual probability that her loyalty to The Agency was in question and more about the extreme risk she posed as their most deadly agent she may have been slightly flattered but no less angry. She was simply too dangerous for her superiors to blindly assume she could still be trusted.

She wondered what it would take to remove this cloud of suspicion and for how much longer she would be under this additional scrutiny. Scrutiny brought about by the mysterious actions of the man she now wondered whether it might be more accurate to consider to be her _former_ partner.

If Bryce Larkin knew what was good for him he wouldn't show his face around her unless he had already cleared up the situation with their superiors. His sweet talk and roguish smile weren't going to cut it this time. If she were honest with herself, his Casanova act had lost some of its charm a long time ago but he had proven to be a hard habit to break.

They operated independently as often or more often than they worked as a tandem and it wasn't uncommon for either of them to disappear without warning when called away for a mission that didn't require the pair of them. But this was the first time she had been deployed under false orders, detained on arrival and interrogated at length about his suspicious actions and possible whereabouts. Now she knew _exactly_ what it looked like when one of those absences was unsanctioned. She had once trusted him with her life but was now starting to doubt that faith in him.

Bryce had earned some benefit of the doubt over their time together - at least with regard to her faith in him as a partner. So maybe her anger was a little bit misdirected. After all it was the man who had originally recruited her, the current Director of the CIA Langston Graham, who sent her on this assignment ten days ago.

The Director had simply said there was an AIC in Hungary who needed someone who could work efficiently and autonomously to deal with some local trouble. Her version of a smash and grab - infiltration and elimination of heavily armed opposition to retrieve a classified target. Her bread and butter. She could often achieve the same results with or without bloodshed - the difference usually came down to whether her presence could or was preferred to go unnoticed, whether survivors were needed for questioning or what sort of message needed to be sent. She was very, very good at sending messages.

She had objected to being put under the supervision of a handler again - especially since one of the explicit operative requirements was autonomy - but Graham had shut her down. He reminded her that although her identity was still classified and closely held, he was still dealing with the scrutiny of the other sixteen members of the Intelligence Community around his rogue agent and anyone associated with him. He told her this mission was just something he pulled off the top of the proverbial pile to keep her sharp until the apparent hornet's nest Bryce had kicked eventually calmed down.

Graham knew how antsy she got when she wasn't in the field and, frankly, he didn't like her to have too much time alone with her thoughts. And so he sent her. Not Sarah Walker.

Sarah Walker, by all accounts, was an administrative efficiency expert currently reviewing regional operations out of a small CIA post in Belgium who had suddenly been recalled to Langley for vague reasons involving administrative briefings and budgetary reviews. No one paid much attention to the comings and goings of Sarah Walker - and no one will have distinctly remembered seeing her in Virginia those days or not - but that's what her personnel file would say.

That sort of thing seemed to happen to Sarah Walker a lot.

The Director had instead sent Nicole Schroeder to Budapest. Yet another woman magically created out of thin air by the maestro Langston Graham to fill the vacuum created whenever Sarah Walker was absent from the world.

She had briefly been Laura Davis when she was processed out of the black site in South Africa where she had been interrogated for eight days. She had been handed a phone with one of Graham's staffers on the other end. Authentication protocols were exchanged before she received her orders, a small case full of mission gear and a packet containing her new credentials from an agent on site and she went on her way. _Just a typical day_ she remembered thinking at the time.

Three weeks and one relatively simple yet highly micromanaged intelligence gathering mission later she became Nicole Schroeder. Now she was thinking that maybe she should simply blame Graham for this entire fiasco - both for sending her here and for targeting her for recruitment in the first place nearly a decade ago.

As she always did, Nicole Schroeder had accepted her new identity without question. Slipped seamlessly into a different woman's fictional life playing her role to perfection...though she sometimes wished she had veto power over the names themselves. She couldn't prevent a mental image of a disproportionately large-headed cartoon character playing Für Elise on a toy piano whenever she introduced herself these last few days.

But while Bryce Larkin did deserve some of the blame for the nature of her recent assignments and Director Graham deserved a share for his part in selecting them, it was Kieran Ryker that was the object of most of her anger. He was the Agent in Charge for this op and the one who had sent her into that meat grinder alone last night.

The expectation of dealing out death and carnage itself didn't bother her at all - or at least bother her more than the nagging buzzing it had become in the back of her mind over the past couple of years. Death and carnage was her stock-in-trade for most of these last six years. At least when slipping in and out like a ghost in the night was not an option. It was the fact that she had been lied to from the start about what was actually going on that really pissed her off. That and the fact that Ryker had tried to kill her himself on a busy street yesterday afternoon.

Nicole inhaled deeply through her nose, opened her eyes and stood. She efficiently gathered a few items from her purse and from around the room. She then stepped out on her covered balcony and placed the metal trash bin on top of a folded wet towel just in case the bottom of the bin was even thinner than it seemed. Nicole Schroeder took her last breath as the woman who had donned her skin carefully and individually burned the last of the few scraps of paper that were the forged passport and other identifying credentials of a fabricated person. In mere moments, without pomp or ceremony, Nicole simply ceased to exist.

The now nameless woman wondered if she would ever go back to being Sarah Anderson. Or if she even wanted to. Sarah Anderson was still on administrative leave pending review. Current Location: Parts Unknown.

As she had watched Nicole burn, she wondered what Sarah Anderson's given name - or rather, _first_ name; they were all _given_ names - might have been if she and her most frequent partner for most of the last two years had not previously met and if he had not overheard what she no more considered her name than any other _nom du jour._

He had first known her as a 'Sarah' having bumped into Sarah Walker at Director Graham's Langley office. That name was not a cover identity per se. It had been assigned as a primary yet seldom utilized alias. A default setting. To Graham's point, he had to call her something. But 'Sarah' was no more her name than 'Nicole' or any of the others that had come before.

Her partner - and that was still how she thought of him despite her irritation with him - had foolishly introduced himself as Bryce rather than an approved alias. He had then eventually become Bryce Anderson more often than not when they were later assigned as frequent partners and had occasion to pose as a married couple. She had learned to live that cover just as she had the many before they met and the many others assumed on various missions since but it had been the most compelling of the bunch. Perhaps she had lived that one more fully than the others even as unwise as that may have been.

When she was assigned to solo missions - usually cleaning up some mess for Graham, often indirectly of his own creation - she adopted yet another new identity. But for nearly two years she had been a Sarah of one type of another more frequently and for longer durations than at any earlier point in her career. It was what Graham called her unless she was specifically operating under a different identity and Bryce had adopted the same habit. Yet she never thought of herself as 'Sarah'. She tried not to think of herself at all.

Bryce had gone off the grid entirely doing God knows what and she had been questioned for days about his whereabouts. It had been mild by her standards - just a little drug cocktail and your standard polygraph - no lasting damage and nothing she hadn't been trained to beat ten times out of ten, just repeated over multiple days. She wondered how much of a hand Graham had in limiting the intensity of her interrogation.

Lying and scheming were second nature to her long before she was enticed into joining the CIA. In the years before Graham had assigned her scores of identities, her father had given her dozens of his own devising. She guessed she had been more than two hundred different people over the course of her twenty-five years on the planet.

The CIA's spycraft and interrogation specialists taught her to school her physical reactions and hide her sometimes raging emotions more effectively than even she had thought possible. Snuff out her feelings, bury them somewhere deep down inside. In a place she couldn't bear to look anymore. Become unreadable. Show only what you wanted others to see. Her father would be so proud.

She was sure that her ineffective interrogators were convinced that she knew very little. Her story had the rare but convenient virtue of being the truth. She had told them truthfully that she had last seen Bryce when the two of them had been lounging in the living area of their shared two-bedroom suite - preferring such an arrangement or even more private spaces whenever the situation and covers allowed.

She left the common room where Bryce had been checking his email and retreated to the sanctum of her bedroom to take a shower and settle in for some quiet time before bed. Shortly after she rinsed her hair he knocked, apologized in his usual automatic and casually insincere way for breaking her rules about intruding in her personal space uninvited and casually announced through the bathroom door that he was running down to the corner for some snacks. He had even asked if she wanted anything.

It was an odd intrusion. Especially knowing as he did how serious she was about the privacy of her nighttime rituals. And even at the time it had ominously reminded her of some of her father's ice cream runs when she was a child. Not the joyful ones after a successful con job but rather the ones that unpredictably turned into absences stretching into days or sometimes weeks. She foolishly expected Bryce to pop back up even days later but that was the last time she had seen him or heard a word from him.

That was over two months ago.

When he had failed to return by the following morning she had tried to investigate the last thing he had been reading but the laptop - one that at least cosmetically was very different than hers - was completely useless as anything more than a paperweight. She had later learned that some components were actually melted. Some sort of aggressive malware was suspected but some of the laptop's components and the damage they had suffered were beyond anything the CIA techs had ever seen.

It was as though it had been designed to melt down but much more elegantly than the usual effective, but easily detectable, CIA tricks of miniature degaussers or small thermite charges. She had no idea where he had gotten that particular laptop - a point of surprising interest to her interrogators.

The only thing of any import - and so little of what he said outside of mission planning these days was of any import - that she could remember Bryce mentioning before he disappeared was that the CIA and NSA were working on something jointly that was going to change the espionage game. Something big. Their higher-ups were pleased that things were finally coming together after some early failures and the approaching anniversary of 9/11 was somehow considered a significant milestone for their efforts. This seemingly minor detail was the one thing she withheld from her interrogators.

She withheld that information for practice more than anything. Or possibly out of sheer boredom. Or perhaps because the anniversary itself roughly coincided with a dubious milestone of her own.

She had been in custody or on assignment for three of their five planned emergency meeting points and their Plan Z - a series of widespread rendezvous points in case either of them had to unexpectedly go dark - wouldn't be active for another three months. If she wanted direct answers she would probably have to wait until then. When Bryce had not showed up at their remaining two locations she began to wonder if she had misplaced her loyalty and should have revealed the minor point she had withheld.

She had not heard of anything unusual in the intelligence community or through any of her less conventional contacts to indicate that he had been up to anything causing any death or mayhem. That should have been reassuring but she knew Bryce - at least professionally. To his infinite amusement chaos tended to erupt in his wake wherever he went but The Agency always knew what he had been up to. They usually preferred her surgical precision but sometimes encouraged his tactics in order to conceal their intentions behind the pandemonium he usually created. But they had no tolerance for agents who disappeared entirely and this silent absence spoke volumes. Something was coming.

As she cast the ashes from the can out into the rain and wind and stepped back inside she said a silent goodbye to Sarah Anderson as well. Whatever Bryce was into - unless he had a vastly better explanation for his unauthorized improvisation than he had ever produced before - this was likely the end of him as an agent. Possibly the end of him altogether. And Sarah Anderson was likely just as dead as Nicole Schroeder.

* * *

The woman leaned with one foot crossed over the other and her tailbone and both palms against the edge of the vanity causing her shoulders to shrug slightly as she contemplated the gun case on her bed. What was she supposed to do now? Even if she decided to do so, disappearing was not an option. Maybe if Bryce hadn't vanished first she would have had a chance but now The Agency would assume the two of them were up to something together and they were clearly well beyond unhappy with just Bryce having gone rogue. She needed to stay the course and allay suspicion. Reestablish herself to buy some time to plan if she were ever to consider such a thing.

No one she had encountered in her time with The Agency was sentimental enough to assume they were something as sappy or impractical as two star-crossed lovers. Nor would they foolishly allow two of their top operatives to roam freely with unknown motivations. They would assume the worst - that they were conspiring in some diabolical scheme - and pull out all the stops to find her. If it were just herself, she could do it. Maybe. At least for a while.

But she thought about the person she was - the person she had become to survive this life. And about what needed to be done next - the commitment - the _longevity_ it would require. Any sane person would agree that she was clearly the wrong choice.

There were literally hundreds of reasons she was the wrong choice. She now knew that her experiences and role were somewhat atypical within the broader intelligence community. Director Graham had the full gamut of potential resources at his disposal. From a legion of conventional agents and support personnel churned out of The Farm on a regular basis to the utterly criminal. Con artists. Master thieves. Assassins. Seductresses. He either developed people filling those four roles internally as a subset of the conventional ranks - or somewhat less conventionally as she had been - or he occasionally contracted out the most distasteful aspects of their world to freelancers when the work required less finesse.

She he had originally thought she would have fallen on the more conventional end of the spectrum but instead now found herself regularly filling three of the four roles at the other extreme and occasionally dabbling in the fourth. She had once hoped to break away from the con game and become someone more respectable, yet she found those skills to be useful for even a conventional agent. It was both a disappointment and a relief - something she _knew_ she was good at - and her prowess had not gone unnoticed as The Agency invited her deeper down the rabbit hole.

The same went for pickpocketing - a skill she developed, expanded and enhanced to conduct heists from the most secure facilities in the world. She had to become a government agent to truly reach her full criminal potential.

She hadn't thought she was wired for either of the other two - the most extreme roles she might conceivably be asked to play. She had once thought that only sociopaths and jaded prostitutes would be willing to perform the extremes of those respective roles with absolutely no compunctions. She honestly couldn't say which was worse. Both were horrific and repulsive in their own special ways.

Now knowing for certain that such things were generally not asked of most conventional recruits - at least not as cavalierly as they were asked of Graham's 'specials' - didn't change the fact that she had reached the height of her profession long before coming to that realization. That ship had sailed long ago. She had almost unwittingly chosen one over the other and found she had a remarkable capacity for violence. And once you were among the killer elite it was difficult to justify utilizing you for anything else.

Her strike team experience was black and white combat - kill or be killed - and she was mostly able to come to terms with that. But her first assassination target had been something else entirely. Just a photo in a folder and an address. Not even a name. A woman labelled a traitor but with no proof provided. A mission completed almost by accident. The first of many.

She was usually more successful at preventing at least her waking mind from contemplating her own milestones - the ones that had come to define her - but Graham had predictably invoked 9/11 for a more self-serving reason when they last met.

What seemed like a lifetime ago, the agent had completed her lengthy and unorthodox training in 2001 just two days before the attacks on both towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a fourth plane downed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after a revolt by its own passengers against their hijackers.

Hoping to reignite her zeal for her new profession after discovering some unexpected revelations during her training about the new life she had chosen, she had attended as an anonymous observer several days earlier when the former Director had delivered an impassioned speech to the incoming class of conventional CIA recruits - many of whom were intended for much less covert roles. As one of the handful of practical children then Deputy Director Graham had plucked out of questionable circumstances to be his chosen few, she had received a similar message behind closed doors. It was the only event that would mark what could be loosely termed her graduation.

Both messages were variations of the same bill of goods she had been sold when Graham had recruited her. Turn her back on a life of crime and serve her country. Live a life of adventure and excitement while serving a larger purpose.

Serve the Greater Good.

That hadn't been the only reason she had originally accepted Graham's offer but she had embraced it if for no other reason than to make her new reality more palatable. She had already seen enough by the end of her training to suspect it was almost completely bullshit. She would never admit it to him now but even on the day she walked out of the secret training facility and embarked upon what would be a remarkable but completely anonymous career she still had hope that she could redeem herself in some way for the sins of her youth and erase some debt on a cosmic balance sheet. Do more good than harm. She no longer clung to such hopes.

Just two days after the completion of her training and field tests, the attacks spurred a frenzy of activity of which Graham - ever the opportunist - took full advantage. The political pressure and media scrutiny drove demands for results that ensured that his new secret classes of operatives would avoid any close scrutiny. And his methods - which once would have been considered controversial - were ignored completely allowing him to produce results more quickly than expected and curry favor on The Hill for his eventual appointment to Director.

She and the rest of his less-conventional, recently minted covert agents - known only to her by a set of operational code names - were all thrown into the fires that consumed nearly one third of them in the first year. Scrambled to the four corners of the world in response to this newly prioritized threat. She herself, like many of her faceless colleagues, had been swept up in the ensuing national pride and briefly nursed new hopes of being in a position to do something about this terrorist threat that shocked a nation and left so many feeling frightened and helpless.

But eventually some distance made even these aspirations fade into the haze of any other mission. While she knew she had foiled many overt threats and thwarted many covert plots against the United States and her interests over these past six years, many other actions revolved around political influence and economic warfare - either defending her nation against such actions or committing them against rivals. Forwarding an agenda rather than protecting a nation. That was the least shocking difference between reality and her naïve expectations.

Too many other missions had focused on eliminating threats directly or by sowing discord between loosely aligned factions - usually by creating the impression that members of one had been killed by members of another - leaving no trace of her involvement in those deaths and letting them then betray and eliminate each other. She couldn't help but think that her role in any of these had left her deeper in the red far more often than not.

Nonetheless, given the coincidental timing of her finally - if more clandestinely than most - joining the ranks of The Agency's clandestine forces, it was not unusual for Graham to comment to her on the approaching anniversary.

It seemed the agent, in all her varied incarnations, had crossed a significant milestone in a solo mission just two weeks before Bryce vanished. With the sixth anniversary of both the attacks and of her secretive induction as an agent approaching, Graham had stopped in to share the news while she was in custody undergoing relentless questioning. Literally a captive audience for his recounting of events she had no interest in reliving.

He had questioned her to his own satisfaction and then assured her that she would soon be released. He said it was for appearances, to ensure no one accused him of preferential treatment or of being anything less than thorough, but she suspected it was lingering misplaced anger toward Bryce. He had apparently decided that this interrogation session at this non-existent facility was the time and place to merrily inform her of her updated confirmed kill count before leaving her there to dwell on it - bound by straps to a metal chair that was bolted to the floor and wired to a polygraph - for most of the next two days.

He had catalogued her actions that had brought that count to an impressive and grotesque 'nice round number' - if she had stopped there. It was the third time he had used that phrase in those six years. Then he catalogued the actions that exceeded that round number for a third time.

The first time had reminded her - reluctantly hopeful - of a repentance tale from Islamic teachings that she remembered from her cultural training and associated readings. The second, morbidly of the 'four times fifty' of Coleridge: "_the souls did from their bodies fly; they fled to bliss or woe_". Her only remaining hope was that none had fled to bliss and her greatest fear was that any had. There was really no acceptable number.

She couldn't even repeat the number itself though it was never far from her thoughts as she had no cleverness remaining for this third such milestone. What Graham saw as tally marks in their favor in the bloody crusade to defend his Greater Good she saw as soul-crushing debits on her balance sheet.

Ever since she had requested her assignments be limited to stealth, extraction and elimination Graham had kept her informed of the body count she had left in her wake. She had been careful to phrase her request in terms of all the things she could still do for him rather than the thing she feared. The possible consequences of being found out while at such a tactical disadvantage represented an unacceptable risk. She had no desire to put herself in a situation that forced her to consider the full range of possible actions ever again despite her training - except possibly in the most impossibly dire of circumstances. She had learned quickly that _Never_ was a dangerous promise to make to oneself but she struck a bargain with Graham to vastly improve her chances.

She had never been comfortable in the role of seductress. She had the benefit of an unconventional upbringing where she had learned to talk her way out of almost any situation. She could convincingly play any role not just a vampish temptress. And when such an approach was judged to be the most effective and likely to succeed, when there was time to plan, the plan almost always included sufficient backup and contingencies to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

When seduction was part of the primary plan, it was never explicitly expected that she even approach repulsive extremes; the full-blown variety she had feared since her formal spy training. When some degree of seduction was involved it was usually a simple distraction or a bait-and-tranq to facilitate intelligence gathering. She had come to find as much amusement in the moment when she betrayed an evil man who she had led on as she found disgust at doing it. Perhaps even a bit more.

But her newly discovered beauty had proven to be a burden when she fit the need for the most obvious of roles and entered into the most dangerous game a female agent could play more often than she had expected. Not every situation allowed for robust planning and not every plan went as expected.

She had witnessed the aftermath far too many times when other female agents had wormed their way into the confidence of extremely unsavory, dangerous and unpredictable men only to make a fatal misstep or to be betrayed by circumstances. Some had survived and wished they hadn't and she was sure the ones who hadn't wished they had. She had seen one fellow agent come out the other side of a horribly overplayed hand changed forever.

Survival didn't necessarily have to mean demeaning yourself by blithely accepting the worst possible outcomes of the game they were playing but it was a careful balancing act with much at stake. It was uncommon but not unheard of for an agent to choose a path that ensured their survival at great personal cost. She didn't know or ever want to find out what they had to do to cope with such situations.

Director Graham heavily utilized conventional agents but also ignored every unwritten rule in favor of results. He had operatives like herself - one-agent wrecking crews - and several other even _less_ conventional resources at his disposal. She had occasionally crossed paths with some of Graham's people who were barely trained and considered lesser resources. So-called Valentine operatives - one of many demeaning terms. Agents in the technical sense only posing as the companions of their targets to gain access and track their movements and interactions. Solely intended as infiltrators but based on what little she knew of them they were not quite as lascivious as male agents often portrayed them.

One had told her that The Director had saved her life and that there were far worse existences. That particular philosophy didn't mesh with her own but she had later acknowledged that these women were survivors in their own way - more resourceful than she had expected with their own avoidance techniques when dealing with their marks and their own coping mechanisms when those techniques failed - even though their reputations carried over to the few full-fledged female field operatives like herself in a simplistic male agent's view of the female agent.

But even those other agents didn't have her array of skills. In a no-win situation she found that she could change the game. And that was how she discovered what she sardonically regarded as her hidden talent.

More often in her early missions - in situations where another agent might consider herself trapped - she had talked her way out or otherwise achieved her objectives through stealth. Graham was unimpressed. He said he could have farmed out that kind of work and called her lucky. A glorified grifter and a waste of her extensive training.

One particularly nasty situation led to something of a habit of escalating with violence to end the charade early, earning her a certain dubious reputation that was thankfully contained within one of many, many code names. That first time, her support team had been unable to implement their planned extraction and her mark had been far more aggressive than she had anticipated. With no small degree of luck, her particularly bloody alternative solution born out of desperation had still allowed her to achieve her objectives. And had gotten Graham's attention.

She logically understood the merits of using every tool at your disposal and tried her best to overcome her revulsion, eventually becoming more artful with her deceptions and more judicious with her wrath. The worst were the overnighters - a Virgin Mary some juvenile, provocative yahoo had nicknamed them. Not after the Holy Mother, of course, but rather the non-alcoholic drink. All of the window dressing, none of the hard stuff. Only employed on less wary, less dangerous marks in scenarios requiring no recurring contact.

She could win the interest of nearly any man and had been trained and equipped - relying heavily on knockout drugs with euphoric side effects and other somewhat revolting tricks with convincing effects - to create the impression they had been intimate with one another the night before then artfully excusing herself from any follow-up activities the next morning. Most men suited for such an approach were simply fools, petty criminals or pretenders. Rarely aware of the full significance of their actions. She was aware that she was betraying _them_ with her manipulations - deceiving them into believing she was something she was not - and so she seldom felt the need to wield the full force of her wrath against them.

But she drew the line there and refused to entertain the thought of overstaying her cover and having to resort to even more convincing acts to maintain that cover or her mark's interest. She would die before she allowed herself to be used that way.

Or someone else would. Not all marks were so easily fooled or manipulated and some had to be dealt with harshly and decisively. She had been trained to recognize the signs and determine when a situation was and was not salvageable - and she had been trained at the knee of a pretty good con man to read people long before that - but many of the decisions were all preordained.

She had realized early on that no matter how seemingly mild your intentions, once you set foot into such a role the downward slope was incredibly slippery. If things went well and you suffered through being kissed or pawed at by someone you despised while pretending to be an enthusiastic participant perhaps you could achieve your objectives without sacrificing too much. Without betraying yourself or what few ideals you still clung to. Without revealing your true intentions or your deceptions. Without suffering the consequences of revealing either.

If things went poorly and all best laid plans failed the options no one wanted to talk about still included the worst. Playing out the cover to avoid suspicion. A repulsive choice she had thankfully managed to avoid that was still preferable to almost certain death. Or so she had been told - a theoretical choice she suspected had more to do with the value of Agency resources and wasn't entirely convinced she agreed with. She had occasionally considered that, if she completely lost control of a situation and there were no other options, she would give them no choice but to kill her rather than become their plaything before they killed her anyway.

After six years she still felt more appreciation than outrage for the man who had laid it all out for her simply because he had been brutally honest with her. He described the dangerous situations she may find herself in, what may be required to survive them and deliberately shattered the last of her naïveté for her own good. She was in too deep by then and he had pulled back the curtain on what alternatives - unlikely but conceivably - could be required of her and what she had to be prepared to do - how convincing she might have to be - if for no other reason that to make it out the other side alive. And she was a survivor.

Always a survivor.

Looking back on every situation where she had begun her deception with a wink or a sultry look - knowing full well where the chain she had started could lead if absolutely nothing went right - only made her feel as though they had all ended in the revolting way that every true operative secretly feared.

She had quickly come to realize that calling any of it a choice of any kind was lying to herself. Eventually, her luck was going to run out. Even with all the backup in the world and the best planning you could hope to have, it was a roll of a die. One she had rolled enough and no longer wanted to gamble herself on.

So, highly trained, having demonstrated her proficiency in combat and having seen too much of the fate she didn't want for herself, she decided it was something she no longer wanted to risk to chance. After initially brushing off the suggestion, Graham surprisingly conceded to her well reasoned argument that she was even better suited to other uses.

She still felt incredibly unclean when such things invaded her thoughts. Both for what she had even, purely as a tactical option, considered doing to survive on a few unfortunate occasions and for what she had traded to - not necessarily prevent - but merely improve her chances of never having to do it.

She had never really considered that she was effectively offering to become Graham's personal fixer. At the time, eliminations seemed to be just as extreme of a concept as what could have happened on those few missions that had nearly fallen apart at the seams completely and required far too much of her. It wasn't as though she hadn't had to kill numerous times over the course of many other missions - been forced into it really by the nature of her service - and she reasoned that at least it didn't require as much of a sacrifice of her soul. After all, if you found yourself looking down the barrel of a gun in her hand or with the blade of her knife under your ear you probably knew what you did to bring her there.

From the beginning, it had seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Of the two, she thought she would eventually become more desensitized but she couldn't have been more wrong. She had just never considered that Graham would utilize her quite so liberally. She had gotten exactly what she asked for and traded one horror for another. And she was so successful at it that she had effectively made Graham's career.

Those with any degree of knowledge of his reputation, from enemies of the state to members of his own Agency or the broader Intelligence Community, came to fear him and his seemingly inescapable reach.

They especially feared the ghost that was his so-called 'enforcer'.

Even so, Graham had not been pleased that one of his few surviving protégés from his days as Deputy Director had become more and more reluctant to allow anything more than a wink and a kiss or occasionally to demean herself by allowing some heavy petting or some other humiliation she would later repay in the course of completing her assigned objective. But he had agreed to her request and reaped all of the unexpected benefits.

She still utilized her beauty, sex appeal and enticement skills. Frequently to set up a kill. Often to quickly gain access to secured areas or other objectives by exploiting foolish men. Only occasionally going as far as a Virgin Mary to leave no indication of her duplicity. Even without going as far as she once feared, she had eventually reached a point where she could barely tolerate a mark touching her. In what passed for her personal life, she was far too concerned with losing her professional credibility to pursue relationships with fellow agents.

When she indulged her need for human contact, her few attempts at relationships outside the intelligence community were doomed to be nothing more than brief trysts due to the nature of her work - adopting disposable identities, her reluctance to trust and her awareness of the blood on her hands. Not to mention the smaller betrayals sometimes required of her while on _those_ types of missions. Short of what other agents may have had to do at one time or another but betrayals nonetheless. She had thought there was no one who could possibly understand the sacrifices she had made. The things she had done. And there had been no one she allowed to remain around her for any significant period of time. Not until Bryce.

She wasn't sure if Graham kept her updated on the number of lives she had extinguished as a show of pride and support of her in her most notable and notorious area of specialty or to somehow punish her for not fully embracing her role as some unvoiced vision of the ideal female agent.

Either way, she didn't need reminding. She knew the number. And she knew their faces. And most of their names. She had added the eleven on the way in and eight more on the way out just over twenty-four hours ago. There had been too many missions like that over the years. So few missions were a simple in-and-out or a glorified con job. She usually got the dirtiest, bloodiest assignments, executed them in the brutally fierce manner that was her calling card and the bodies had piled up quickly.

She had once done the math. It was similar to the example of earning a penny on the first day of a month and doubling it every day. It sneaks up on you, closes fast and overtakes you completely in the blink of an eye.

After the first ten days of doubling your penny, your earnings increased from a single cent to a vastly improved but still modest five dollars a day. After twenty days it ballooned to five thousand. By the end of one short month your wage would be five million dollars. Per day.

Her burden was similar - but like so many things in her life upside-down and backwards. Decreasing instead of increasing. Dividing instead of multiplying. Destroying instead of building. If every kill had cut her soul in half, as it had felt after the first one, what was left of it was now infinitesimally small.

Divide by two enough times and you close on zero unbelievably fast. If you're feeling generous, divide by something less than two as many times as she had and you didn't fare much better. What little was left was questionable in its significance - even if she limited herself to Graham's preferred count of only her direct kills rather than every casualty on every mission. She wondered every time she got even closer to zero just how close she was to simply blinking out of existence.

* * *

Ryker should have raised the count by one and put her one step closer to oblivion but she had missed her opportunity and only managed to wound him. She stood to her full height and let her bare feet carry her back to the sliding glass door. She gazed straight through her faint reflection there - through the ghost in the glass - at the thunderstorm raging outside and fumed as she recalled how he set her up to do the wet-work for his little money grab and tried to dispose of her afterward.

Never mind what a cocked up plan it was in the first place. There were no terms of inheritance. The vast sum of money had simply been transferred to a secure account at a private bank and the only people who could currently access it without assistance lay dead on the floor of their palatial dining room.

She had hunted down Ryker's tech guy - a scrawny, twitchy little hacker type who liked to call himself Spider and spout unoriginal nonsense proclaiming himself the master of the web. Spider didn't realize how close _he_ came to increasing the count by one.

She despised hackers - always hiding behind their computer screens and their clever little self-created nicknames. So self-important yet never really putting themselves at risk. He was more fortunate than he would ever realize to currently be cuffed to a radiator with a broken knee cap and several broken fingers. Probably sitting in his own filth by now. She would call it in once she was clear of the city and have him brought in to corroborate Ryker's rogue action. Or Ryker would find him first and tie up the loose ends for her.

She had considered eliminating him herself but realized Spider didn't know any more about her than Ryker did and so she left him to his fate. It didn't matter to her either way. Killing him quickly didn't improve her situation at all and she was sure he wouldn't appreciate her mercy if Ryker was the one who found him. Her vague amusement at the idea of what would happen to him if Ryker found him alive with no information of value to offer may have been why she left him alive.

She focused her eyes on her reflection in the glass of the door rather than the tempest raging within her shadowy image and her mirror-self seemed to judge her for such a casual dismissal of yet another human life. But he was as complicit in all this as Ryker and didn't warrant another thought from her now that he had revealed all she needed to know - that Ryker had known everything from the start.

Ryker had played both sides against each other and tried to use his own agency to take advantage of it. Convinced the banker to move _all_ of the funds to his own in exchange for false promises of protection and to temporarily mask his involvement. Convinced the bad guys that their money man was betraying them with predictable results while gathering everyone who could point back to him in one place. And worst of all, convinced both her and Graham that this was a legitimate op with a completely fabricated target requiring a minimally proficient agent. Ryker kept up the charade while she independently confirmed his falsified reports and unnecessarily tracked the movements of the key players. All he really wanted was muscle to go in and soften up the opposition.

The one thing Ryker could not have anticipated was that due to the current lack of confidence in her by her superiors she would be a part of that pool of potential agents who fit the required mission parameters. Loners. Killers. Ghosts. Ryker had wanted one of The Agency's disposable assassins but coupled with Graham's desire to get her back in the game, he got her. As far as Ryker had been concerned she was completely expendable and had not been expected to survive. He clearly had no idea who he was dealing with.

Spider now knew exactly who - or at least _what_ - he was dealing with. It hadn't taken long for him to break, his initial bravado crumbling under the sheer intensity of her restrained fury. All she initially asked for was his name. Just a name and the pain could stop. Break the persona and break the man. She had quickly learned that his real name was Norman and shortly thereafter he had told her everything.

He told a sputtering, sobbing story about stumbling onto the inconsistencies in the banker's finances and, after digging deeper, determining that he had been stealing from multiple clients for years and funneling the proceeds to a secure account. An account at a private bank that required the physical presence of an account holder and a fingerprint match - of even the tiniest fingers - to access the account.

The banker had thought those precautions would give him some measure of protection but his most dangerous clients had killed him and his wife not realizing any of this. Or realizing that prior to their visit the banker had completely emptied their accounts into his own at Ryker's direction in exchange for promises of protection that never came.

When she had defied expectations and survived her initial onslaught, Ryker made a tactical error that ultimately revealed his true intentions. She had planned on slipping out once she retrieved her objective but the nature of the package prevented that. He _should_ have immediately sent her to engage the reinforcements - the outer guards she had earlier evaded to maintain her strategic advantage over the more concentrated group - that she later had to fight through on her way out anyway. Then he could have concocted a story to cover his tracks, sent her on her way _if_ she had survived and gone in himself after the smoke had cleared.

Maybe he had panicked not knowing whether anyone else knew as much as he did. Or maybe he was just too big of a chicken-shit to face any remaining opposition himself. Either way, he had opted to direct her to retrieve what he deemed 'the package' - the last surviving person capable of accessing the account and Ryker's true target.

That third person was barely three months old and would have to wait nearly eighteen years to independently access the funds. The agent was still unclear exactly what he had expected to do next. Keep the girl in isolation for the next eighteen years and eventually manipulate her into accessing the funds? Lop off those tiny fingers or otherwise lift her prints and try to manipulate the records, size differential and any number of other security obstacles to pass himself off as an authorized account holder? Pose as a guardian? Forge some sort of power of attorney?

Norman was unclear on those details but some combination of the last two or something similar were probably part of the plan and she found she was uninterested in the details. The agent smiled wickedly at the thought that she had made those plans, whatever they were, irrelevant. Neither the Hungarian mafia nor the rogue agent would be getting their hands on any of that money. Or on the little girl.

* * *

So the agent took stock of her current situation as a particularly violent thunderclap shook the building: she had been saddled with a handler for the first time in over four years because of the uncertainty around any involvement she may have in whatever Bryce was doing. She had been sent on a suicide mission into a farcical, impromptu dinner party for the leadership of half the Budapest underworld apparently celebrating the murder of their financier and his wife. And the handler she hadn't wanted to deal with in the first place had tried to kill her. At least her life couldn't possibly get any more complicated given her most immediate concern.

Her most immediate concern, and the biggest reason by far that she directed the vast majority of her hatred toward Kieran Ryker, was the now relentlessly screaming bundle haphazardly swaddled and resting in her gun case turned makeshift bassinet.

She had given a lady down the hall eight, brown 2000 forint notes to watch the baby for four hours while she gathered the information she needed to determine why they were after the baby in the first place. She would have paid ten times that but it wouldn't have meshed with her hastily concocted cover story of a desperate mother needing to go to a job interview.

She had paid Norman a less-than-friendly visit, confronted Ryker to confirm the story, failed to kill or apprehend him and then while contemplating her next step - as she began to make her way back to the hotel with no specific mission objective left to achieve - she had stopped in her tracks in the middle of the sidewalk as she suddenly realized that her entire life was at a crossroads.

She stood stunned by the revelation - and her shame at the fact that she could even entertain the thought - as fellow pedestrians sidestepped to avoid her like a stream breaking around a stone in it's path. There was absolutely no legitimate government interest served by her returning to the hotel to collect the baby from the complete stranger she had given the equivalent of less than a hundred dollars in Hungarian currency, a few disposable diapers and a single bottle of ready made formula.

She had no real need to go back to that hotel at all. She rationalized for a moment that since Ryker had not already come looking for her at the hotel he must not know she was staying there. So surely it would only further endanger the baby if she _were_ being followed and chose to return there now.

But she was sure she wasn't being followed. As good a liar as she was, she couldn't lie to herself. Not about this.

There was no magnanimous justification for running away that she could convince herself was true but the smart play was still the simplest. She had backup credentials and half her mission bankroll hidden in a locker at a nearby train station. She could be out of Budapest inside the hour. There was no valid tactical reason to go back to the hotel.

None at all.

None except to be absolutely certain the child would be safe. To see to it personally. She had no reason to worry about such things - her mission here was over - she had not yet reported Ryker's betrayal and he was still hunting her. The smart thing for a survivor like her to do was to disengage and withdraw. To walk away.

Yet here she was now, standing in near pitch black darkness staring at a wailing baby lying in a gun case.

Unwelcome and completely unexpected thoughts about the horrific but unlikely things a stranger could have done with a baby had sent her rushing back to the hotel as fast as she could without drawing unwanted attention. The woman she had chosen solely out of convenience to watch the baby girl had chuckled at her disheveled appearance and the obvious relief that was, surprisingly, entirely unnecessary to fake.

She felt no ill will toward the child herself. In fact, she tried frantically for the next hour and a half to attend to her every need but had no idea what she was doing. The baby girl had finally slept for nearly two hours but the thunder had woken her again and now she was inconsolable. Diapers had been changed and a bottle of formula drained. The agent was at a loss for what else she might need.

It had been so long since she had seen anything good and pure that it scared the hell out of her. She had just killed nineteen men and tortured and seriously injured another. Now she was trying desperately to keep a tiny baby alive. The Greater Good for which she had been fighting what seemed like every waking hour these past six years had always been a complete abstraction. So much so that she had begun to wonder whether there was such a thing. Was this little girl really worth saving? She could become anything. She could become a doctor. Or a teacher. A force for good in the world.

The murdered banker and his wife would have provided the little girl a life of comfort. And where would that path have taken her? A life of privilege would have given her every opportunity but also exposed her to every vice. The baby girl's parents had foolishly involved themselves in a world they didn't fully understand, why would their daughter make any better decisions? Given a life surrounded by ill-gotten opulence would this little child have been able to make the right decisions or would she become entitled and cruel?

But what would happen if the agent - or the woman she had considered abandoning the baby in the care of - had simply decided to drop the child off in a local orphanage? Adoption into a happy home? Possibly. A perfect storm of luck that led to a happy future? Unlikely. Even less so in this less than hospitable area. A lifetime in an institution somehow resulting in a successful, happy adulthood? Conceivable - but only if she ignored every wicked thing she knew of the world. A too-short life of some combination of poverty, crime, addiction or prostitution? Far more likely.

She briefly wondered if she had done the girl any favors by saving her life. Circumstances clearly weren't enough to ensure a happy future. Starting your life in even the most loving of environments guaranteed nothing.

She needed to look no further than her own childhood to prove that. The chain of events beginning with the agent's own choice at the age of seven to follow her father's path instead of staying in the loving home that her mother would have provided had set her on a bloody path that brought them together all these years later.

The agent morbidly thought that if the little girl was extremely fortunate and made the perfect decisions at the perfect times she too could avoid a life as a con artist and still live a life of lies and thievery. Avoid being labelled a criminal yet live a life of crime. Avoid the brothels and still become a reluctant temptress, with the possibly of worse on a really bad day. Dare to hope to change the world and instead do so by becoming one of the world's elite among killers. Just like her.

But at that moment the baby girl briefly stopped crying with a little snuffle and just stared back at her. She hesitated to touch the tiny, perfect creature afraid that she would taint her in some way. She looked into her eyes and wondered at the possibility that at a time predating her earliest memory she might have once been that innocent.

The corners of her mouth turned up and she laughed silently to herself - she never laughed out loud anymore - as she conjured up the image of herself as a modern day Diogenes but with an even more ambitious quest. Searching for a good person rather than the already impossible goal of seeking a merely honest one. Of course this little baby seemed like the embodiment of goodness. She had seen nothing of the world. She wasn't even aware that her parents had been murdered mere hours ago.

How much more did the late Nicole Schroeder have to see to finally admit to herself that the cause she had sold her soul to champion was a falsehood? That a suspicion she had long feared was true; that the Greater Good was a lie? Or at least it was almost never whatever the CIA declared it to be.

She had thought she saved lives by stopping arms trafficking only to realize those arms were then redirected to fuel some conflict that better influenced a more desirable political environment somewhere else in the world. Just as many bullets found just as many uses and turned just as many people into just as many corpses.

She had helped dismantle rebel factions - whose overall aims she could find some sympathy with but whose brutal methods she could not - because they opposed the aims of her government. She had assisted other practically identical and equally vicious groups because they aligned with those aims.

Whether she ever took the time to process if she personally agreed with any of the decisions or not, they were driven by a political agenda and might made right. It wasn't for the Greater Good but for the marginal benefit of a specific group far away from the killing fields. Within the borders she left behind, who could say whether more or fewer lives were lost or ruined based on her actions?

There were many such examples and it was rarely as simple as killing a madman with his finger on a button - killing one to save thousands. More often the mission consisted of retrieving or obtaining information or some specific thing by any means necessary for an unknown or non-specific future purpose. Or simply eliminating people who stood in the way of some vaguely defined agenda that could change like the wind.

A few black-and-white missions had come her way over the years and were definitely the most fulfilling. But was it worth the many charcoal grey things she had done with more ambiguous motives to ultimately position herself to do such things? Would she ever find a worthy cause that was clearly the right place to make her stand?

Such questions were considered to be ill-advised and well above her pay grade; deemed to be counter-productive and beyond the understanding of a cog in the clandestine war machine. And she was trapped in this mad world. Disobedience was treason and her masters had many ways to encourage compliance.

So, like many others in her profession, for years she had shielded herself from her own conscience by wandering further and further away from questioning the justness of her assigned directives. Embracing the excitement and adventure of near-death experiences and choosing willful blindness too often in the name of self-preservation and some semblance of sanity. In for a penny, in for a pound and the more lost her true self became the more easy the compromises became.

Clear opportunities to do something right and just were rare. To sacrifice only of herself without bringing suffering to others in order to help someone else. But no one was so unselfish. She herself was certainly no martyr.

Everyone was corrupted in some way and, when there was any risk to themselves, thought only of themselves. Maybe she would reconsider if she ever met someone who had lived long enough to face the evils of the world and had not turned from the light in some way. Maybe, like that of Diogenes, such a search would simply be a derisive commentary on the futility of the search. Just another bad joke.

But she could do this one thing - save this one small person who was the only indication she had seen in nine long years that the concept of a Greater Good might not be entirely a fiction created to rally dangerous, thrill-seeking people like herself to do the bidding of the US government.

Despite the horrific things her government had demanded of her - and despite her own need for excitement and adventure that had mostly run out of steam but had allowed her to convince herself for a long time that such things were necessary evils - she still clung to some hope that at the core of it all her duty to her country still held some inherent importance. That she had done _some_ good despite her methods. She was the best in the world at what she did and had no idea what else she could ever be. So she clung desperately to the hope that at least some of the ends justified her vicious means.

Her own account may be beyond reckoning but perhaps some good was done along the way. Otherwise her entire adult life was a complete waste. And so she would keep lying to herself - telling herself that she had made the right choices, that the ends could justify the means, that she hadn't sold her soul for nothing and that she could use her prodigious if unsavory skill set to make a positive change in the world.

That she was a good person.

That lingering sense of duty - of purpose - whether it was illusion or not was all she had left. No matter what she had once hoped to achieve, this was all she was now. Just a spy.

But if the Greater Good was a complete lie why did she feel as though she was standing here looking it in the eye? Maybe she had cast her net too wide; set her expectations too high. She had never believed in fate, opting to believe that each person chose their own path. Wrote their own story. Was responsible for the choices that made them who they were. But maybe she herself wasn't the one who deserved saving. Maybe all her past misdeeds had been to position her for this one foolish act. Could all her wicked deeds be justified because the end result was positioning her to save this baby girl?

Maybe the Greater Good didn't exist or it was just so far beyond her reach that she could never truly be a part of it again. If she had helped to build a better world she had forfeited her right to be a part of it in doing so. But that didn't mean there wasn't any goodness in the world.

* * *

The baby had begun to cry again and everything she tried to soothe her was futile. So, as much as she hated to do it, the agent's thoughts turned to the one person in the world she knew would and could help with her current predicament. The one person whose scrutiny she had never wanted to face and who certainly didn't deserve to be drawn into her dangerous world.

She had left a few incredibly brief, often incomplete and occasionally completely incoherent voicemail messages over the past few years. She always made a point of deliberately calling the woman's house phone when she knew with absolute certainty she was not home. Sometimes she called just to hear the still familiar voice on the recorded greeting.

She almost always called from a phone forwarded to a number she kept solely for voicemail service. A number only two other people knew. The fact that Bryce was not one of the two was one of many an irritating flaws that had not been enough to make her face the nature of their relationship until now.

Four long years ago she had made the mistake of calling with a recently acquired burner phone and leaving a few seconds of dead air on the machine without blocking the call display. The number had still been forwarded to her voicemail account. It was an uncharacteristic mistake.

But that was another lie. It was no mistake at all. She had been hoping that exactly what happened next would happen. A return call. She had watched with the phone clutched in both hands and gasped as the number she had memorized appeared on the display while the phone rang the requisite number of times. She shuddered with relief as she dialed the forwarded account after anxiously waiting several minutes after the ringing had stopped and heard the automated voice tell her there was one new message on her voicemail.

A message that had bought her to tears as she listened to it at least a dozen times before destroying the now effectively useless phone and SIM card and allowing herself a moment to mourn a lost life. A message she had never deleted and still listened to occasionally over the past few years. The last time she had listened had been just before doing what she did best at the direction of someone she now knew to be a rogue agent. As she tried to make a decision she had been considering since her revelation on the streets of Budapest, she indulged herself by listening to it once more.

_Hey, honey. I haven't heard from you for a while. I miss you. Wherever you are, I hope you're okay. Safe. I want you to know, if you ever feel like you need a place to come home to...well, you have one._

She liked that message.

_Heard from you in a while_ referred to a dead air voicemail a few months prior. But the woman had always been patient. She obviously knew who was making these prank calls but there was nothing accusatory in her message. It was as though the two of them spoke regularly but their calls had simply been missing each other recently.

The agent often abandoned herself to that fantasy when she listened to the message - pretending that it was exactly the case rather than the reality that they hadn't seen each other in nearly twenty years. Just the hope that she could one day be forgiven for all she had done and be so welcome and loved somewhere was comforting despite the fact that it would never happen.

She had sought her out shortly after she completed her first major rotation abroad and and was surprised to find her living in San Diego as she herself once had. Probably _because_ she herself once had before contact was severed completely. She had considered trying to reconnect a few times since. To see if she could possibly be forgiven for what she had done all those years ago. Or to at least let her know that she was OK.

Which was, of course, yet another lie. She was pretty fucking far from OK in so many ways. And there were unforgivable mistakes and a whole childhood of lost time between them that she could never make up for. But maybe this was the person who could guide this baby girl and help her walk the tightrope she herself had fallen from long ago. Help her take the path that she herself had not. The safe home that had been offered to her could be given to someone far more deserving.

And so she dialed the number from memory, listened to three rings, swallowed a lump in her throat and ignored the burning in her eyes before responding as, for the first time, something other than the answering machine answered the call.

"Hi Mom...It's me."

* * *

END OF LINE


	2. II: Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond

...in which a government agent finds it necessary to sever her last remaining tie to the life she left behind and a retrospective view of her extensive training experiences following her recruitment...

Canon Reference: flashback elements of 'The Baby' (episode 5.08, concurrent with as yet unrelated early events of 'Intersect' aka the Pilot, episode 1.01) and non-canon pre-series origin elements

Contents: Double-feature! Two chapters (Ch 2 & 3); one medium-length and one long (presented in several sections), 5,250 and 8,250 words, respectively - 13.5K of story, the rest is rambling; claim your favorite comfy chair, plan your reading, snacks and beverages accordingly and read one today and one next Monday if you prefer! I deemed Ch 2 too short (at a mere 5K) to leave it hanging between the behemoth of Ch 1 and the merely bordering on extra large Ch 3 - and I want to wrap up the prologue ASAP so we can get to Burbank...don't you? (two more prologue installments after this one)

A/N: I am overwhelmed by the good feelings from reviews, PMs and follows. Its, like, a quart of lutefisk worth of good feelings! Which I am assured is no small thing. It was somewhat of a relief to publish Ch 1 - now I can stop futzing with it. But I like to think it got better - if longer - with each revision and no chapter (in human history! - perhaps not, but definitely in this story) went through as many revisions as that beast. So maybe it's all downhill from here? Thank you all and I hope you find this installment as interesting as the first. I also hope everyone had a pleasant Mother's Day. With that in mind, the title of Ch 2 and its timing are - as they say - purely coincidental. (Additional story notes for Ch 1 - 3 at the end.)

Disclaimers / Easter Eggs: The author has derived no income or other profit from this work. No ownership or claim is asserted or implied to the characters or story of the television show CHUCK or the movie _Tron_ in this or any subsequent part; additionally in this part no ownership or claim to any Warner Bros. Looney Tunes characters, _Grosse Point Blank_ (a reader pointed out at least a conceptual parallel with the 'shakubuku' / baby scene from GPB in the last chapter as well, Thanks MVK!), _MacGyver_, _Serenity_, _The Princess Bride_ (reaaaally obscure, novel-specific reference), Metallica's _Wherever I May Roam_ (for really no more than four synonyms in a particular order) or _Frozen_ (within these introductory comments) is asserted or implied.

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Part II: Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond

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002: Mothers and Daughters

San Diego, CA; Wed Sept 19, 2007; 11:46 am

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The agent looked at the small, quaint house from the driver's seat of her sports coupe. At a home she had driven by so many times before but never dared stop at. At a front door she hadn't been sure she would ever walk through and had now resigned herself to the fact that she likely never would. At the fleeting shadows of a life she had left behind. Those hopes belonged to someone else now.

She rounded the car to the passenger door and extracted the baby and the car seat that held her from where they were wedged less than ideally into the passenger seat. She grabbed the duffle bag full of the essentials her mother had advised her to get and the other items she had been gifted for the baby from the rear floorboard and suddenly there she was. Standing on the front porch with her right hand clutched to her chest and her left grasping the railing was the woman she hadn't seen since she was seven years old. Since the night she had chosen adventure - a life on the run with her father - over a real childhood with her mother. Her mother had aged, of course, but was every bit as beautiful as she remembered.

Emma Carter stood rooted to the top step as though stepping down into the dreamworld in front of her would cause her to wake. She watched as her daughter directed a tight-lipped smile at her, rounded to the driveway and made her way up the sidewalk unwilling to test her footing on the front lawn given her precious burden.

She pictured her precocious little girl as she remembered her - with her blonde hair in pigtails, wearing Mary Janes with knee high socks. A version of her daughter existing only in Emma's memory who was not cradling a baby but rather two or three new prizes from the public library - ridiculously above her expected reading level - clutched in her tiny arms.

She tried to reconcile her with the statuesque blonde dressed all in black. A dissonant image of flowing blonde hair, a fitted leather jacket and impossible stiletto boots juxtaposed with a car carrier with its handle in the crook of her right arm and a pink bundle inside. A time-lapse avalanche in her mind attempted to fill in the gaps - imaginary images of all the versions of her daughter that had been lost to time.

She didn't know what to make of her wardrobe but couldn't stop her smile to see her daughter all grown up and even more beautiful than she had imagined. And her eyes welled with tears with the first validation she had with her own eyes in nearly twenty years that her daughter was alive. Her hand covered her mouth involuntarily as she waited to meet her little girl again. And her little girl's little girl for the first time.

The first phone call four days ago was a shock. She had restrained herself from asking the dozens of questions on her mind and helped her daughter soothe her baby to sleep. Her daughter had apologized but said she needed to sleep while she could - something her mother understood all too well - and a promise was made to call back soon. That second call came yesterday and offered little more explanation but even more surprises.

_Mom, I don't have much time. There's only so much I can say right now but years ago I made some choices - joined a certain organization - and right now I'm just...I'm over my head. There are bad people looking for us and I can't do what I have to do with a baby. I wish there was another way but I need your help. I'm sorry but you're the only one I can trust with this. I'll see you tomorrow._

There had been no chance for Emma to speak after her initial greeting upon answering the phone. And too much promise in those last few words for her to process. She was going to see her daughter. Actually see her. The daughter who had rattled off all of that information as quickly as humanly possible and had hung up abruptly after Emma had responded simply, without pause or thought of refusing: "Of course."

Emma barely processed the noise of a bustling public place in the background while trying to digest the minimal information that had been conveyed. She had been waiting by the front window ever since. Last night she had pondered what it all meant before eventually falling asleep in the front room facing the street with her head resting on an arm that was limply draped over the back of the couch.

She had no way of knowing that her daughter had deliberately kept the first call limited to the innocuous topic of caring for a baby and the second cryptic and brusk call was carefully worded due to her knowledge of FBI call listening programs in the area. Especially calls with this point of origin. She just hoped monitoring in San Diego was still more focused on calls from across the Mexican border and calls from China were of more interest in San Francisco. Carnivore had been replaced by N.I. for monitoring the web and she knew they were experimenting with digital translation and tracking of voice traffic in major population centers as well. She needed to make sure her mother was expecting them but was being overly cautious not wanting to chance any key words that might be flagged on her mothers non-secure telephone.

But Emma was a clever woman who had spent years wildly speculating and she easily slid the puzzle pieces into a few theories that seemed to fit. Given her daughter's upbringing she could have meant mafia or some crime syndicate but with what little she knew of her daughter's final disappearance, Emma assumed that 'organization' more likely meant government. With the mention of 'bad people' she hoped it didn't mean she was involved with _both_ in some kind of undercover capacity.

Either way, she was astonished at the path her daughter's life had apparently taken since she had fled with her father. And every day since when she had wished her little girl would just come home. Emma regretted that she hadn't been around as much as either of them would have liked just before her daughter ran away. She had buried herself in long hours of work and in her own studies. Trying in vain to forget what was lost and working tirelessly to build a new life once it was just her and her daughter.

But she had forgotten the importance of simply being present in her daughter's life. And of reassuring her daughter that she was not to blame for anything that had happened. She was always so smart and so mature and chose to put far too much responsibility on her own tiny shoulders. She knew her daughter blamed herself and wished she had told her as many times as necessary that none of what had happened was her fault.

Emma had been attending night school to finish her degree - in all honesty, inspired by her brilliant little girl - and one night while Emma's own mother had dozed in front of the television that little girl she so vividly remembered had simply disappeared. Emma had threatened to stop allowing the visits between her daughter and the girl's father when he became unable to or uninterested in holding down a regular job and reverted back to the grifter ways he had left behind years prior. And regretted it every day since.

There were occasional phone calls on or around major holidays and her or her daughter's birthdays and a few in between. If she pushed too hard or argued with her daughter's father she received a simple "I'm sorry, Emma." before he said he had to go and hung up. If she successfully fought that urge she would get an opportunity to hear her baby girl excitedly talk about their previous adventures but never their current whereabouts or activities. Nothing specific or her father would end the call abruptly.

She shared any scrap of information she could gather with the FBI agents assigned to her daughter's case. An attempt at a trace the second year led to a near miss by local law enforcement in South Carolina. And that had led to less frequent and more unpredictable calls that could not longer justify constant monitoring. The FBI never established a pattern from tracking down the origination points of reported calls that would allow them to anticipate her little girl's whereabouts. They were always two steps behind and sometime shortly after her daughter's fourteenth birthday the calls simply stopped.

There was no contact whatsoever from her daughter for five long years. She had hoped she hadn't gotten in too deep in one of her father's cons and gotten herself into some sort of trouble or hurt somehow. He had called on their daughter's eighteenth birthday as though he expected to find the two of them together. He was calling hoping to thank their daughter for something but she wasn't buying his story: witness protection, his record expunged, their daughter somehow separately relocated herself for reasons still unknown to either of them.

She tried to continue her search with the new information he had provided. The agents indirectly confirmed part of the story by informing her that they would no longer be able to assist her in her search. They had been blocked from further investigation of him as a suspect in a kidnapping or any other crime. They still had extensive information in their files of course, but had they attempted to replicate those earlier findings they would have discovered that the man they knew as Jack Burton no longer existed in any government database.

With what little she learned from him she had packed up and moved to the city where he and their daughter had last lived together and briefly employed a private investigator once settled in San Diego. She was surprised that she had found a scrupulous one when he informed her that he simply couldn't continue to take her money after two months of fruitless searching. Jenny Burton, as her daughter had once called herself, like her father, had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Although she called to check for any new leads twice a year, the case remained forgotten for several years until a female DEA agent that the FBI agent in charge remembered as 'beautiful, but a real ball-buster' came storming in and warned that they should forget everything about her visit and their kidnapping suspect as he was part of a high-profile upcoming trial.

The Federal file clerk with her horn-rimmed glasses and hair pulled back in a ponytail who accompanied the DEA agent was timid and reluctant to make eye contact with anyone but she had presented all the required documentation to seize their files and the agents' case notes. Those files were the last government documents associated with either her daughter or the girl's father. Emma assumed it was part of his witness protection arrangement but now, if not for the few pictures on her wall, it was as though neither Jack nor Jenny Burton had ever existed at all.

She had hoped until two days ago that the rest of the story her daughter's father had told her was true and that her daughter was simply safely relocated to a new life. That she stayed away due to whatever concerns about her safety had driven her into hiding or old hurts. It seemed now that assumption had been partly true. A few vague phone messages over the ensuing years - often just several seconds of dead air - let her know that her daughter was alive. She assumed at the time that her daughter was breaking the rules of her relocation arrangement and would return when it was safe so she didn't push the issue. She had spent years living on the bread and water of these infrequent and brief contacts.

Yesterday's phone call cast cast at least some light on the subject. The timing seemed as though it couldn't possibly be right. She would have been nearly sixteen around the time she was relocated. What would any government 'organization' possibly want with a sixteen year old girl? She assumed her daughter had also witnessed some criminal activity and the government was keeping her safe. But then she had apparently later gone on to become an undercover agent of some kind. An ability to move in the same circles she had developed as her father's understudy likely put to work to stop criminals rather than to commit crimes.

Exploring the idea that she was an undercover agent of some kind she assumed there were similar rules about maintaining her cover so she didn't voice her questions about the nature of her daughter's job on these most recent phone calls. She wondered if even those brief calls had ever put her daughter at risk and assumed that was why so little was ever spoken.

She had fallen asleep on the sofa last night with the thought in her head that all that mattered then or now was that her daughter was still alive. But only now, seeing her here in the flesh, did she truly believe it.

When the strikingly beautiful and completely unfamiliar young woman carrying the baby finally reached the porch she started to say "Mom, I'm so sorry…" but was cut off by her mother's bone crushing hug. It was all Emma could do not to burst into tears. As she melted into her mother's embrace - the first purely loving human contact she had experienced since childhood - even as hardened as she had become her daughter wasn't much better.

She wasn't sure what resources Ryker still had at his disposal, whether there were any additional partners to assist in his pursuit of her or whether he was now already on the run himself. Maybe The Agency would remove the threat for her relatively quickly but maybe others would try to find the little girl and attempt to cash her in like a lottery ticket. She had to act based on her current knowledge of the situation - or lack thereof - and only her fear for her mother's safety made her able to break that embrace.

"There's so much I wish I could tell you but I have no idea whether they've picked up my trail. These are very dangerous people - and I have no idea who else might be involved. The longer I stay the more danger I put you in." The agent had double checked the paper trail many times in the past, utilizing her training to ensure that this was a connection that no one could make. She'd be damned if she let anyone use her mother against her as they had once used her father.

Her identity and her father's were still secure. Graham had kept his word but done a shit job of it. He had promised her father's safety and had chosen his usual methods for dealing with such problems. The clean slate he had promised apparently extended only to 'Jack Burton' and any new arrests would potentially tie to any number of other names. So she had long ago added a few layers of obfuscation to the official records associated with her father's true identity and any other aliases of which she was aware hoping to reduce his criminal footprint and the likelihood of him doing hard time if he were ever caught again.

Every time he had a scrape with the law over the past several years she had found a way to fix it. On the few occasions when they had spoken she never corrected him when he laughed at what he thought to be the incompetence of the police or his good fortune at getting off on various technicalities.

The agent hadn't used her real name since she had left home. Her interference over the years coupled with her father's falsifications of records during her childhood and the fact that her parents had never married had left no traceable connections that she could find. It would take one hell of an investigator to unravel the web of their lies.

She had even abused her powers, her official and unofficial contacts, some of the contacts and skills of her teammates at the time and her still sharp con skills to brazenly run a con of her own against the FBI. She walked into the FBI field office nearest the town where she was born and partly raised - with a teammate using her usual brand of shock and awe to run interference - and walked back out with every scrap of information concerning the investigation of her father for her own kidnapping. She later used the contacts of another teammate - herself an FBI agent - to call in another favor to erase any digital trace of him.

Her father had chosen this life. She could only protect him so much. But her mother was off limits and the farther she kept her from anyone who might want to use her for leverage over her con man father or the agent herself the better. She had never expected to use that disassociation to create a safe haven for someone else. But now that she needed that separation she didn't question her luck at having unwittingly already laid the groundwork. Even knowing what he knew, Langston Graham himself would have a difficult time making this connection if he cared to try.

"God sweetie, this is all so hard to believe. You're some sort of...what? Secret agent? You have a baby girl you need me to take care of. I'm so happy to see you...to see you both but it's just..." and with that Emma looked down at the baby girl in her daughter's arms, sighed deeply and paused before she smiled and asked "She's so beautiful. What's her name?"

The younger woman's icy persona was betrayed as she softened visibly, looked sadly at the little girl and absentmindedly played with one of the girl's curls. She thought briefly of the name she had been calling her if only in her own mind. "I'll leave that to you." she whispered with her gaze not leaving the baby girl's face. "Even I can't know her name. Or yours...you don't have to change it right now but you might have to one day. That way no one can make me tell them anything they could use to find her if we ever have to..." she trailed off.

She had thought this through thoroughly but was having some trouble with this aspect of it. The forever part.

She could isolate herself from the baby but she would have to rely on her mother's judgment to decide if the contingency plans she had written for her to memorize would ever have to be used. And what would happen if she were ever forced to reveal anything about her mother's identity or whereabouts? Or someone dug deeply enough and hard enough to find some connection she had missed? Any failure of her own could mean making her own mother choose between sacrificing herself to save the child or saving herself instead. Force her to burn down the life she had built in her absence to keep this little girl safe.

To face the same test of basic humanity the agent had faced herself just a few days ago and to her shame barely passed. She had no doubts about the outcome if her mother were faced with such a test.

If her mother followed her the plan she had written out the baby would never be traced - but her mother would always be her mother. It was a flawed plan. The only alternatives were to force her mother into hiding or to never tell a soul about her existence. To purge the memory from her own mind. Failing that, Emma Carter would have to vanish.

She wasn't about to fail her mother like that. She could do this. She _had_ done this. Compartmentalism in the extreme. Lock it away with all of the other things she couldn't afford to think about. She began the mental exercise of erasing her mother from her memory. Just as she had an uncanny knack for slipping into another person's skin - becoming the cover - living the lie - she could manipulate the details of her own story. Any of her stories. Just another person that she once briefly was.

Maybe under torture, asked specific questions, it wouldn't hold up. But she bitterly thought that convincing herself that she had no mother wasn't a far cry from her actual childhood. And she was highly trained to resist such interrogation. The walls in her mind were going up easily but she had to get out of here. Now.

"There's some cash and more instructions I thought of on the plane. Some emergency procedures in the bottom of the diaper bag. An account I'll move some money into when I can so you can get what you need. A couple of old contacts you could use to get some documents."

She had chosen only the contacts she believed to still be on good terms with her father and she looked down and fought a feeling of inadequacy at the pathetic excuse for a diaper bag. The government issue canvas, olive drab duffle bag mocked her and only reinforced her feeling of how totally inept she would be as a mother. Luckily someone she knew to be a fantastic mother - one she had once foolishly turned her back on - had stepped up and the child wouldn't be subjected to that additional horror in her young life.

"Use dad's name not mine." _Not any of mine_ she bitterly thought. "Start with Vinnie, he always liked you. Asked about you years after..." _After I left._

She still couldn't face what she had done and here she was disrupting her mother's life again. Forcing her to deal with yet another act that would affect her mother's life far more than her own. And she was running away from her actions again.

She was such a coward. A child playing superhero. And she certainly didn't deserve this precious little girl for however long she could evade the hunters who would pursue them both.

Even the thought of trying to keep her - something that kept invading her thoughts even after she set their destination on San Diego - seemed selfish. A desperate ploy to inject some light back into her life. She started to move to leave - to return to the shadows -and Emma tore herself away from staring at the little girl she was now holding in her own arms when she noticed the physical chasm that had formed between them and realized what all these instructions were leading up to.

"You aren't leaving already? I just found you again. This is your home too. It doesn't have to be this way." Her heart swelled at her mother's plea and the idea that she was still welcome here in her Mother's new home after running away so long ago. But she knew the risks and she knew the reality of the situation. That door was shut forever and she was still running - she would probably be running forever. She didn't have a home.

"Mom, I've thought a lot about this and…and, I can't stay. Because for both of you to be safe well I…I can never see you again. When the CIA recruited me I was on the run with Dad and we changed our identities so much that they never knew you existed. And we can't let them find out about you now. No one in the world knows my real name besides you and Dad. You should be safe."

Even though Director Graham _thought_ he knew her real name, her father had long ago used every shady trick and contact he knew to evade law enforcement including blackmailing a man responsible for processing court mandated changes into providing modified birth records in a way that looked like a simple filing correction. They had avoided the common mistake of retaining her true birthday and later he had bribed someone else to make a similar change to change her name again and make her older on paper, only changing the year of her new birthday. He had found one lie but not the other, certain that he had dug deeply enough to best such common criminals.

She had personally erased any remaining record of her former self when she destroyed every piece of evidence from the FBI's case against her father and the references to her other self contained therein. The friend who had helped her with that particular caper had, uncharacteristically, not even tried to peek. She had just smiled and said it would ruin the mystique.

She still had some secrets - even from Graham. She made a mental note to make sure that job had been done thoroughly and in a way that would survive the scrutiny of any government agency. Erase the child she once was from existence. Sever the last tenuous link between her and her mother despite the improbability of someone ever discovering her birth name. She was almost startled when her mother spoke.

"When you were a little girl all I ever wanted for you was a normal life. But you went off with your father and he was never one to…" Emma sighed as that thought trailed off. She didn't want to belittle her daughter's father. After all she had chosen a life with him all those years ago and stayed with him throughout her childhood. Now was no time to question why she had never come back. She thought she knew her daughter - or at least the little girl she once was - well enough to guess anyway and wished she herself had behaved differently in those final days. Had somehow made it OK to stay.

Emma was surprised that her daughter described her recruitment as occurring when she was still with her father. And the slip her daughter had just made referring to the CIA - accidentally or deliberately confirming her speculation as to the true nature of her government service - had just explained why she hadn't reached out as an adult.

She was as practical as her daughter and realized now that her daughter's sole focus was on her safety and that of the baby in her arms. Realized that there was no exaggeration in her daughter's concerns and that her daughter intended to lead whoever was pursuing her away from here.

Her younger self had always wanted to be a superhero - as likely to don an improvised cape as a tutu. Occasionally both. And apparently now she was one, complete with supervillains and other dangerous foes. Emma had no choice but to trust that she knew what she was doing and was good at what she did or she would never have found her way back to her. But she was awed at her daughter's choice to paint the target on her own back to save the baby girl in an act of maternal selflessness. Even after eighteen years of uncertainty she had never thought she could be this frightened for her daughter. Or this proud.

There were so many things that Emma wanted to tell her - the things she had hoped for her daughter's younger self - but time was getting short. In the few conversations she had with her daughter's father over the past few years she had learned more than she wanted to know about what that life had entailed. And what it had not. "You just...you never got to go trick-or-treating or play on the soccer team or ever get to go to prom or homecoming. I just wish I could have given you at least some of that."

The agent smiled at her mother but didn't specifically respond. These were old regrets and there was nothing that could be done for it now. "Don't forget this. It's important. The instructions tell you all about it. Burn them once you've learned them and always - _always_ - keep a fresh battery in it."

She handed her mother the beacon disguised as an old-fashioned silver rattle that looked somewhat like a small door knob or drawer pull. Demanding a rush job on that particular modification from one of her underworld contacts in Bangkok - utilizing a remote-activated beacon pilfered from her mission gear - had been an interesting conversation.

"Umm, she likes to be wrapped up in a blanket. It helps her sleep. And the sound of the rain, she likes the sound of the rain. And I've noticed that car rides…"

"It's OK." her mother said softly, trying to infuse her forgiveness of every perceived wrong her daughter may have blamed herself for as she resigned herself to watching her daughter disappear again. "I'll take good care of her."

Emma trusted everything her daughter had told her and her reasoning for leaving so quickly. She was taking small steps away from her as she spoke - slipping away again - but something was preventing her from turning and leaving.

"Yeah, I know...I know..." Maybe there was something that could be done for her regrets. Not for herself, but for this little girl. "Umm…"

"Yes?"

"Going to prom and soccer games and all of those normal things that you wanted for me? Will you just make sure that she gets them?" The hardened CIA agent was barely holding it together. She hadn't thought about that night in a long time. The first time she ran away, her father had returned her with no one the wiser. The second time she had insisted that she just couldn't stay any longer. But now, with her whole world gone pear shaped, she finally knew for certain that night eighteen years ago her seven year old self had made the wrong decision.

"Of course I will."

"Thank you."

And as she looked one last time at her mother and at the baby girl in her arms, the agent knew the girl would be safe and happy here. Knew that this time she had made the right choice. Some things were still worth saving and no matter what her mother ultimately named the little girl, the child would always represent the same thing to her.

_Hope_.

Cruelly, it seemed to Emma, her daughter was gone. Perhaps forever this time though she would never stop hoping that she would one day return. A few minutes at the threshold of her doorway was the extent of the reunion for which she had been waiting nearly twenty years.

Emma Carter briefly lamented the fact that her little girl had grown up to be so much like her father and she would likely never know anything real about her. And she looked down at the pink bundle in her arms, certain that she was looking at her own granddaughter.

At that same moment, as she sped away and continued the mental exercise of excising every scrap of information about her mother from her mind, Emma's daughter realized she had said nothing that would prevent her mother from coming to that conclusion.

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003: Gifted

Multiple Locations - Primarily Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) and Boston, MA; Jun 1998 to Apr 2001

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Annabelle Harvey had a gift. To say she picked up languages easily was like saying Mozart picked up music easily. A certifiable hyper-polyglot, if the experts ever agreed there were such a thing, she worked diligently with CIA language instructors as well as multiple language departments of Harvard College. If she kept her current pace she would finish her college career with an unprecedented triple major in Slavic, Romance and Germanic Languages and Literatures in just three years.

She loved it. She loved the learning on its own merit and likened it to the cons she would run with her father and the many roles she would play. She had self-taught a few languages in her youth but here in a more structured educational environment the process was accelerated exponentially.

Through the travels of her youth, she had mastered multiple dialects and regional accents in English and had a substantial head start on the Romance languages having voraciously studied Spanish and French both in her own haphazard way and in the multiple schools she had attended as a child in her travels with her father whose own Spanish was limited and unconvincing.

She had managed to self-teach both spoken and written Russian fairly well out of random curiosity and a bit of spoken German, Polish and a few others had also slipped in there along the way. Gifts from people she had met - Annabelle's many previous incarnations absorbing every interaction. The first thing she felt she had truly contributed to her father's cons had been looking out for double crosses from her father's business partners as they spoke in their native tongues behind his back while she lingered in the background. Saving his skin more times than either of them cared to count. Protecting him from the shadows.

With mousy brown hair almost always pulled back into a ponytail or up into a sloppy bun and sporting particularly unstylish horn-rimmed glasses and generally frumpy, ill-fitting clothes her intellect was her only remarkable feature. Her father had fostered her gift for mimicry, encouraging her to observe and emulate the inflections and dialects of those around her. And their travels had exposed her to all types of people such that she was able to get by passably in all six of those languages prior to her recruitment.

After some introductory training on maintaining the persona of Annabelle, she entered Harvard off-cycle in the summer of 1998 and there she refined her Spanish, French, German, Polish and Russian somehow compressing the equivalent of two years of study in each into a summer. It was mostly filling in some blanks and by the fall, other token elements of her training adjusted their minimal expectations and intensified considerably. This reduced her blistering pace somewhat but she focused on various regional nuances of the languages she already knew and soon added Czech, Italian and Swedish.

She had also taken on Chinese, Thai and Arabic purely with CIA instructors with an eye toward becoming conversant but not necessarily fluent as she would never pass as a native. Her surprising proficiency was making them evaluate ways she _could_ be made to pass as a native. The information her CIA instructors drilled into her about the nations whose citizens spoke the various languages she was learning would have been more than enough to complete at least one additional degree in International Studies and fool any native unless she accidentally claimed to have once been a neighbor or schoolmate.

Even ignoring the vast amounts of information about cultural norms and regional dialects she incorporated, her instructors at both the CIA and Harvard were amazed at her ability to process the learning of multiple languages simultaneously. It was simply unheard of. To the point that she was called away on multiple occasions for various brain scans while conversing or translating on the fly in any of the languages she had learned. She was told this would help the CIA more accurately identify recruits _capable_ of learning multiple languages. It was a knack she had always had - it just seemed to her that it had intensified since she had joined the CIA's advanced training program.

She had been put through a full week of tests to evaluate her overall health and fitness with an off-the-charts showing in mental acuity, a dismal performance in basic marksmanship (following some basic firearms training), a passable proficiency at basic self defense and as part of testing for various vaguely-described and unnamed research projects. These results had later been used to coordinate her training upon which she had already been extremely focused. She surprised herself with her proficiency in many areas and their methods had seemed to noticeably improve her ability to absorb, retain and recall information.

The Agency had intervened on her behalf to significantly modify the required core curriculum. She didn't regret losing the quantitative and science requirements. As brilliant as she was she always had little interest in those subjects. She also wondered if she was the only person at Harvard who would not be required to satisfy any sort of Moral Reasoning requirement. She had already read most of the required texts recreationally anyway.

She had laughed at this exception considering a certain so-called 'moral flexibility' was one of the traits Deputy Director Graham cited that made her a good fit for what he needed in an agent. He had never explained to her that actually obtaining a degree was completely superfluous to his plans for her. Graham had also arranged for his recent batches of recruits to bypass all psychological screenings. Annabelle would have failed them all spectacularly.

Annabelle's story was that she aspired to be a linguist for the UN. She secretly entertained the fanciful notion of becoming a teacher one day. Like her mother.

She didn't socialize much and was rarely seen on campus during what should have been her downtime. She looked at least as old as most of her fellow students but Graham had worked his magic such that her credentials declared her to be eighteen when she first enrolled.

Her father had worked his less elegant brand of magic several times over prior to that. The unintended result was that no one, with the possible exception of the man who had recruited her, realized she was only sixteen years old when she first arrived at Harvard and barely sixteen at that. Sixteen and, with her recent regrettable high school experiences, completely unprepared to interact with other college students much less deal with the impossible workload she had undertaken.

There were many discussions amongst the faculty that they shouldn't allow such a heavy workload and should encourage her to participate in more social activities as no one ever remembered seeing her outside of class. When the topic was raised to the Dean he replied that a significant donor was acting as her benefactor and wanted to ensure that she studied as many or few languages as she liked.

With the largest endowment fund of any university in America by far it was never clear why one particular donor carried so much weight but Annabelle continued to express her desire to press on with her studies. She knew better than to say differently and said it with a smile. Graham did his part and, for his trouble, ensured that the Dean's brother in law received a very favorable early parole arrangement.

No one knew where she went when she wasn't on campus but when she was there her work ethic was unmatched. She had been warned that failure to achieve her training goals could result in any number of unpleasant repercussions up to and including termination of her candidacy with an ominous emphasis on the word 'termination'. Or worse in her opinion, reassignment to training for a lesser role.

They needn't have bothered. She was driven to accomplish something everyone around her seemed to consider impossible simply because it was impossible. She found that she could hide from the unpleasantness of her recent high school days by throwing herself into something she was truly good at.

She was the darling of her professors despite her awkward demeanor, reserved nature and having become even more withdrawn over the past six months - even as she gradually abandoned her scholarly appearance for something more alluring - but Annabelle would never actually complete a degree of any kind.

.

* * *

Lydia Blake was a daredevil prodigy. The last weekend of every month Lydia travelled to various locations - an entirely new one every few months. Most of this began in November of 1998, well after Annabelle Harvey arrived in Cambridge. For the first several months these weekends were mostly spent on the salt flats of Utah driving vehicles of all types beyond their limits in tactical driving training. Despite her true age she had possessed a driver's license for well over a year. One acquired from a friend of her father of course, that also matched her vehicle registration under a name other than Jenny Burton.

Although she should have only been recently allowed to operate a vehicle that was one of many rules she and her father had ignored. She had been driving their cars since she had been tall enough to do so relatively safely - since the summer she turned twelve. Now she got her chance to drive every type of commercially available vehicle under the sun. Everything from big rigs and dump trucks to high-performance sports cars and motorcycles. She had a gift for it and one thing was immediately apparent - fast was her default setting.

For a few months after that she spent those weekends at Fort Rucker in Alabama learning to fly all manner of helicopters. Primarily Hueys and Blackhawks. Here she was an Army lieutenant with yet another name. Very little emphasis was placed on actual flight time. Her emphasis was on 'bug out and put down' and a few evasive maneuvers. She wasn't being trained to transport fellow agents per se. She was being trained so that in an emergency she could take the controls and get herself and any mission related intel or other materials she might be carrying - and any teammates or friendlies if reasonably feasible - out of a hot zone and subsequently set the bird down safely.

Helicopters eventually gave way to the same sort of paranoid thinking but for light aircraft and business jets at Vance Air Force Base near Enid, Oklahoma. Flying T-1A Jayhawk and T-6A Texan training aircraft. And Lydia briefly gave way to another name and another rank in a different military branch. She really wanted to get into a T-38 but there was no justification for learning to fly a supersonic trainer. She was preparing for aircraft she might encounter on missions and a fighter aircraft was simply not considered likely.

The likely scenario was described with the more palatable euphemism of 'in the event of an emergency'. Creating such an emergency by killing or incapacitating all on board was a possible reality they did not yet think she was prepared to face.

The pattern was broken up occasionally with other specific trainings. The first of which occurred in an aircraft hangar at Reagan International Airport in June of 1998 in her first days after reporting to accept Graham's offer. Figuratively signing her life away as there had been no actual official record of her - only a highly classified 'ghost file' accessible by a mere handful of people in the entire US Government. This was months before Lydia even came into existence - long before the salt flats and the air bases. Even before Annabelle Harvey arrived in Cambridge.

It was not her favorite - focusing on manipulating and maintaining her appearance for various covers. They had pulled directly up to a large isolation chamber in the center of the hanger where she could come and go and try on new faces without being seen by most of the people present.

She had been so excited about having her braces removed that she hadn't noticed the looks exchanged between the two dental technicians. Although perfectly qualified for the work, they had never actually seen a recruit with their teeth still in braces.

Though her smile was now by any definition perfect, she had hoped they would fix her teeth. She had been teased mercilessly about her big front teeth and had never really accepted that she had grown into them and that her smile was among her best features.

But they finally convinced her that none of her teeth were too big or too small and that her smile was unique enough to be intriguing but hard to specifically describe as a potential identifying feature and wouldn't need to be modified. Even so, ten years of being reluctant to smile only aided her ability to school her expression and hide her true feelings. A skill equally as valuable in her new career as it was on a con.

A half dozen beauticians next went to work on her in turns with a few similar reactions. Some had experience making underage girls look inappropriately alluring in previous fashion industry experience and were unfazed. Others were less jaded and more protective of her. For her part, having just turned sixteen upon reporting to the address Graham had given her she was equal parts intrigued and uncomfortable.

She couldn't have imagined how much there was to a beauty regimen. One of the more protective cosmetologists helped her compile a running list of instructions for skin and hair care routines and other grooming reminders. The session was much more instruction than any kind of pampering but never having any friends to do this sort of thing with other than trying to emulate a few older acquaintances she found it completely overwhelming.

Her hair was cut, finger and toe nails cut and polished and stripped again, every part of her scraped or peeled or waxed or plucked. She was taught how to apply makeup to varying effect and how to properly apply a wig and some prosthetics. Her hair was restored to her natural blonde correcting the effects of the boxed color that she had recently used in an attempt to fix an equally unfortunate bleach job.

She was pleasantly surprised with what the experts could do to her appearance after they removed the braces from her teeth and coifed and manicured and otherwise beautified her in every possible way. The hair stylist was briefly left alone with her while teaching her to properly apply a wig and a few ways to wear her now lustrous, long blonde hair.

The stylist had signed what seemed like dozens of non-disclosure agreements and had a vague idea what was going on here from gossip by some of the others who had done something like this before and the frightening security presence. She was trying to stifle her earlier reaction to the young girl in her chair, her vivid imagination concerning the complexity and security of the operation and the various possibilities such a beautiful girl might be being prepared for.

She let the girl's hair fall naturally with its simple wave and leaned in to whisper the only piece of advice she dared "Just don't go growing up too fast, hun." before turning the girl around in her chair to face the mirrors.

She bit back her snarky response to that as the chair turned, thinking vaguely that she grew up a long time ago. But she was completely unprepared to see herself like this. As she should have been. A pretty young girl with minimal makeup and a perfect smile.

She looked like her mother.

She had barely a moment to process the unfamiliar beauty staring back at her in the tri-fold mirrors. She sat stunned in the glaring lights with her eyes locked on those of a beautiful young woman she didn't know. One so different than the one who had been picked on mercilessly for the last year and a half. One who disappeared again as a few of her attendants returned and focus turned to hiding or altering that beauty and her true face in various ways to take on the specific appearance of multiple identities.

A bookish student named Annabelle who would soon be attending one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. A gothic outcast named Sloan who would frequent a few training sites near to but separate from Annabelle's world. A red haired daredevil without a name who would later become a young woman named Lydia. They each had their parts to play and were added to her portfolio along with many others. After a weekend of instruction and with the right materials she could become any of them in minutes. There was no room left for the girl she should have been.

Months after this shocking reveal certain decisions were made based on the observations and recommendations of her instructors in Boston and Lydia came to life for those specialized driving and flying trainings. Her basic martial arts training had revealed untapped potential and her expectations had been significantly modified. Later trainings were even more physically active in nature.

She was sent for paratrooper training - starting with basic recreational skydiving and rapidly advancing to Military Free Fall training including both HALO and HAHO jumps. The adrenaline junkie in her loved the HALO jumps. She was also trained in advance dive techniques. Again starting with a recreational approach to SCUBA diving, to advanced rebreathers and DPDs and, finally, unassisted free diving to world record standards. All while wearing high-tech cat suits or wet suits and custom goggles that monitored every possible physical and neurological response.

Some were harrowing like her modified Level C SERE training - a special session she attended with no other candidates - or simple practical adjustments like her trainings on long-range and heavy weapons that could not be accommodated in her usual shooting facility. Some were less exciting but no less useful, like combat medical and tactical communications training or working on her hot wiring and lock picking skills. She was already a decent car boost and proficient with a pick-and-wrench but she could now drive off in most cars inside of a minute and crack simple locks in just a few precious seconds. With a full kit, her lock picking would make her the envy of any legitimate locksmith but she minimized her usual tools to a few reliable, multifunctional ones.

She was also taught how to bypass or otherwise defeat state-of-the-art electronic locks. Sometimes with proper equipment, sometimes with decidedly low-tech, improvised tools. _MacGyvering_ they called it after an old TV show she had seen a few episodes of when she was little. Similar treatment was given to alarm systems including hacking and looping video surveillance.

She was an innovative thinker but also a deliberate planner and her instructors were impressed with how quickly she absorbed the principles of strategic and tactical assault planning and how well she applied them. They shouldn't have been - thinking two steps ahead had been how she had kept her father out of jail and above ground her entire childhood.

On occasion she was taken to a medical facility where a small army of technicians put her through various tests and full body and brain scans while she sparred with single or multiple opponents to evaluate the toll her training had taken on her body - typical of any agent training they assured her. In early 2001 she was sent for abdominal surgery to preventatively remove her appendix and address a potential hernia. She had been laid up for two weeks and used the time to learn Portuguese. Or at least the foundations - Annabelle would be fluent in no time. Otherwise, up until around that time, it was all go all the time.

Lydia loved that one weekend a month. In fact, Lydia only existed that one weekend a month - when she wasn't adopting a cover within a cover. She was fearless and all her instructors agreed that she had a surprising knack for any and all of the crazy maneuvers they trained her to execute. On wheels or wings the girl could fly and she became a master of every possible manner of incursion and evasion.

According to public records, Lydia Blake succumbed to smoke inhalation in an accidental house fire in Portland, Oregon on April 12, 2001.

Of all the places she had travelled for her various trainings Portland was not one of them.

.

* * *

Sloan Gershon possessed an unexpected gift. She was graceful and fluid in her movements which, with the right training, were translated into brutal and lethal. She had danced as a young girl and loved it but grew tall and lanky early on and was discouraged from seriously pursuing it both by her instructors and her father.

Her instructors said they considered her long, lean physique atypical for a dancer but she knew it was more that she was just a little bit clumsy and awkward as she adjusted to the rapid changes to her body. Her father deemed it an impractical skill that was too difficult and expensive to pursue while changing towns every few months.

People in this affluent neighborhood gave her a wide berth with her jet black hair styled in a shoulder length bob, dark makeup, strategically ripped clothing, and a small nose ring in her left nostril - a real one - her one small, short-lived rebellion against all of the structure imposed on her life. Besides her instructors, the only person who interacted with her was a young woman named Wendy who worked at a nearby coffee shop.

Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon and most Sunday mornings, Sloan waited there pensively contemplating the latest learnings of her other selves - nursing a black, unsweetened coffee - like her father used to drink - prior to attending her training in a small nearby dojo attached to a vacant store with blacked out windows.

Like Annabelle, she had always had a gift for mimicry but Sloan's training emphasized the physical aspects of that gift. Her assessments had revealed a number of poorly executed but still effective judo and aikido throws and restraints. Gifts from her father - or more accurately an associate of her father - in case she ever needed to 'get out of a jam'. Her uncanny ability to almost perfectly mimic the movements of her instructors allowed her to easily correct the form of the few moves she already knew once she was properly instructed on the principles of leverage they relied upon.

Her proficiency was entirely unexpected. It was not the reason she had been recruited. New and more instructors were brought in after five months - what had originally been intended to be the end of her 'foundational' training period - and plans were made to experiment and expand her training with specialized paramilitary trainings under different identities once per month. Most of these would be based upon the trainings required for the Air, Maritime and Ground branches of the Special Operations Group of the CIA's Special Activities Division and conducted at private training centers. And thus, Lydia Blake was born.

After some early successes, Sloan's instructors quickly learned to follow her suggestion that she first be allowed to observe moves from the side, standing in a designated spot in the corner of the room against the wall between the dojo and the adjacent vacant space. She often returned to the mat with the new skill at least roughly duplicated and sometimes nearly perfected and focus turned to seamlessly incorporating it into the skills she had already mastered.

Sloan found the addition of striking techniques viscerally satisfying and the force she was able to generate with her long limbs was devastating. She may have been too tall to be a ballerina but - when it came to inflicting damage - she was made for it.

Another five months after the decision was made to significantly expand her martial arts training it was her sole female instructor who inadvertently planted the seed in her mind. Xiuying's specialties were Wing Chun and Krav Maga, two close-quarters fighting styles with very different philosophies. But it was when she watched Sloan fight in more open styles that she first noticed Sloan's ability to efficiently and naturally chain moves together.

Compliments were rare in the dojo but Xiuying quietly made the spontaneous observation in her native Mandarin that Sloan was "a creature of extraordinary grace" who "moved like a dancer." Sloan was the only person present who heard and understood what Xiuying had said. She smiled slightly but was met with only a curt nod.

Sloan considered the possibility for a few weeks before attempting to convince her instructors to supplement her training by including ballroom dance. She argued quite logically and unemotionally that dance was the childhood training that helped her tie her martial arts moves together so fluidly and would be a useful infiltration skill in its own right.

In May of 1999, when her instructors agreed and told her they had received approval to allow three hours of dance instruction every two weeks, Sloan simply nodded and maintained a stone faced expression. Outwardly, the supposedly eighteen year old agent in training was impassive; inwardly, the still sixteen year old girl squealed with delight.

Every other Wednesday her dance instructor, Keith, would pick her up at the coffee shop and take her to a nearby studio two blocks away where she sometimes worked with other older recruits but usually just with Keith. He was classically handsome with a strong jaw, dark blue eyes and wavy hair. He was tall and lanky with broad shoulders that made his thin frame seem even more tapered. Tall enough that they fit together well when she wore the heels to which she eventually grew accustomed.

The adrenaline junkie and the scholar had other outlets. In those activities she found fulfillment and accomplishment. But this was a glamorous and elegant representation of the lifestyle she hoped to lead soon. It was the one pure joy in Sloan's militantly regimented life.

She intensified her focus on her combat training to ensure the privilege was continued and after eight more months her training expanded into weapons - various edged weapons, sticks, staves and firearms. She was already a deadeye with a knife; at least a knife with which she was familiar. Another gift from her father who seemed to know every concealed weapons law in the United States and a brief but educational stint traveling with a carnival.

This skill was not a surprise to her instructors having been advised of it by the man who had recruited her but her ability to adapt it to other skills was a welcome surprise. She learned to quickly assess and throw with pinpoint accuracy any rigid object with a pointy end. Escrima sticks were similar enough to close quarters knife fighting and the Bo was an entirely different animal but proficiency with both was desirable because reasonable approximations of both weapons could often be found just lying around.

Firearms were a different story. Her father had told her the old adage "Don't point a gun at anything you don't intend to kill" and it had the intended effect - making her frightened of even being near a gun. He had always said they cause more problems than they solve and if you see that a mark is armed get away as quickly as possible. He hadn't always heeded that advice himself but did often change their plans to back away from cons on unexpectedly armed marks - when they could afford it.

The vacant store and the dojo had a sound proof range in their shared basement where she worked with pistols and a few assault rifles. She was tasked with breaking them down, cleaning and reassembling until she could do it blindfolded with the components of three different unidentified weapons in a jumbled pile in front of her before she ever fired a shot. She persisted and - despite the kick and the sound which had both scared the hell out of her the first few times - her accuracy was improving when she didn't think too much about the damage the bullets could do to a real person.

Keith hadn't known what to think of the 'Goth chick' sent to him for ballroom dance instruction. After the first few sessions she had lightened up on her makeup and ditched the nose ring at Graham's insistence (though it left a barely noticeable, easily concealed scar) and it had become obvious to him how young she was. And how interested she was.

Never given any time to socialize with college classmates or fellow trainees on her crash courses and with all of her male martial arts instructors being grizzled veterans of various armed forces at least twenty years older than her, Keith wasn't just extremely attractive, he was also the only reasonably viable option for any romantic interest.

After six months and a dozen classes, one day dancing a tango she had feigned being swept up in the moment and tried to kiss him. Keith pulled away slightly and locked gazes with her for an uncomfortably long time before asking how old she was. She persisted in returning his stare and lied.

"Twenty" she said when, in truth, she had turned seventeen five months ago.

Upon first meeting her, he noted that she was undeniably beautiful but then all of the recruits he had seen come through this facility were. But over time two key differences became apparent: First, she had already outlasted any of the prior women sent to this brutal training program by far and most of the men. He himself had only lasted four months before being considered 'capped out' in terms of his potential. And second, she clearly had no idea, or at least acceptance, of how remarkably beautiful she was. Even so, he had a baby sister older than Sloan. It wouldn't be fair.

He studied her for a moment longer and then told her "You're a good liar but you'll have to be better. I'd hate to see you die." Keith was a good man but he also knew they were being watched. Sloan was actually _enjoying_ her training and he knew she still had no idea what she had gotten herself into. He was ten years her senior even if she _had_ been twenty. He suspected she was barely eighteen when they had started working together six months ago not thinking that an underage recruit was even a possibility.

Sloan was embarrassed at the aborted kiss and more than a little disappointed. She had been secretly plotting that moment for a month. But she hid all of that behind her best con artist smile, took a guess and asked "So, who is she? Wife? Girlfriend?"

"Neither." he smiled back "But you are very perceptive."

"So...it's not that there isn't someone in your life but you aren't together. Why not?" she continued to pry.

"The life of an agent is...difficult...sometimes. It's hard to actually have a real relationship. Especially for female agents." He paused as he considered how much to reveal of what was yet to come. "Its completely unfair but they have a harder..." they were interrupted by the ringing of Keith's phone. He checked the display and excused himself to answer it. When he returned he was polite and his usual smiling self but he was also all business.

Keith never brought it up again and she never tried anything again. When they were alone she tried to ask him questions about life as an agent but he would only vaguely respond and emphasize that there was a lot she still had to learn and that he hoped she would be OK. He tried to limit their discussion to social graces and etiquette but she shared some vague aspects of her past and her hope to redeem herself through her service as an agent.

Eventually Keith shared some of the tamer stories of his time as an agent that he hoped would provide some valuable lessons. Graham and his people had been watching and had warned him not to scare her off in any way. But Keith had come to think of her as a little sister and worried at her naiveté. He never voiced his concerns to her about why she was still here - constantly training - when she was already, according to her instructors, one of the most proficient martial artists they had ever trained.

One Wednesday, after a year and a half of twice-monthly dance lessons, Frank, her Jujitsu and Aikido instructor, was waiting at the coffee shop. Her face dropped as he held out a cup containing her usual coffee order - one of the sugar free vanilla lattes Keith had introduced her to - and told her to come with him. She knew not to question her instructors but her instincts were buzzing and her swirling thoughts drifted to how he knew her usual drink and, randomly, mused that all of her male combat instructors were named Frank or Steve regardless of ethnicity.

Frank ducked into the locker room briefly and when he returned he stated very calmly "We're discontinuing your dance sessions. What do you think we should focus on instead?" They were in a position where 'Frank' knew the cameras couldn't see her face and as he turned to walk the same direction as her he whispered "K.I.A." and discreetly slipped her a small piece of paper folded in half. There had been a longer letter in Keith's spy will that Graham had intercepted. But Keith had known Frank for a long time and had addressed the letter containing the innocuous note - and a patently false story about its meaning - to him. Frank knew from the choice of paper alone who it was really for.

"I'm not sure. Can I go change and we can discuss it?" Sloan had managed not to react on the dojo floor and retreated to the locker room with the note clutched tightly in her fist. _K.I.A._ Somehow, she naïvely had not even considered the fact that Keith was also a field agent and was off doing dangerous things in between their sessions. She felt the tears threatening and a pressure rising in her throat as she smoothed out the crumpled corner of a breakfast menu from her - their - usual coffee shop and slowly unfolded it. There were only two words.

_Stay Alive._

The tears dissolved into anger as she wondered why he couldn't have followed his own advice. She splashed cold water on her face and focused on stilling her shaking hands before she changed and went back out to where Frank was waiting.

"Shooting." she said without prompt and without pausing as she passed where he was standing and walked toward the stairwell to the basement shooting range. She had no idea where to direct her anger or who was responsible for Keith's death. But for the first time in her life, Sloan felt the urge to kill someone.

Every other Wednesday became additional time on the shooting range and her anger intensified. Her training schedule had been scaled back somewhat when injuries to sparring partners and instructors became frequent occurrences as her fighting style had become vicious. She and her instructors had created a fluid and brutal combat style that emphasized her speed and leverage against larger, physically stronger opponents.

Her once perfect form was compromised somewhat by her newfound savagery when angry - which seemed to be all the time now. It created holes in her defense but the overall effect had become even more deadly. The addition of bladed weapons to her unique hybrid hand-to-hand style had evolved into something one of the 'Steves' enthusiastically described as "the Tazmanian devil covered in razor blades".

Over those six months her shooting had become lethal and she never worried again about what a bullet could do to flesh. If she ever pointed a gun at someone it would be because she intended to kill them.

After a few months, the unseen team of scientists in the vacant store next to the dojo declared that they had gathered all the data they needed from the martial artist - the perfect template for future trainees. And the transition from artist to fighter was what Graham had been watching for. Now that the young woman was no longer so easily mistaken for a young girl, they were ready to move to the next stage of her training.

Sloan Gershon didn't come in for coffee on April 11, 2001. The dojo closed the next day and the only trace of her ever existing was the woman at the coffee shop. When an Agent performed a follow up assessment Wendy spoke of the goth girl whose edge had softened a bit over those three years would simply regurgitate what Sloan had mumbled to her a few days prior when Sloan informed her that she was going away: it was 'something to do with a boy'.

It was what Sloan had been instructed to say but Wendy hoped the boy in question was the tall man who had stopped coming around several months ago. Every other Wednesday had been the only times she had seen Sloan smile.

.

* * *

Harvard University; October 2000

.

Annabelle Harvey hadn't been informed of any funeral arrangements for Keith but really hadn't expected to be. She had thrown herself into her studies in an attempt to hide from the unwelcome and unacknowledged emotions threatening to cripple her but the CIA seemed to have conspired to reduce the workload of all her incarnations.

Sloan's training sessions were more maintenance and brief, extremely intense sparring sessions at this point with Sunday sessions shortened and Friday sessions removed completely. Lydia had only been called upon once in the last three months and only two training missions for additional identities had come up during that time. Annabelle had been focusing on combination accents - accents of the native speakers of one language while speaking another language - and various dialects of previously studied languages. She had not added any new languages to her repertoire since the summer. She was getting anxious and felt a need to fill her time when one of her professors introduced her to a young woman named Amber Reynolds.

Amber was average height, with a curvy figure, long chestnut hair and bright green eyes. She was an outgoing sociology major taking French as an elective because she had always wanted to visit France. Amber was 22 and approaching her graduation but didn't want to drop the class and admit defeat. She had asked her professor who among the students in his classes might be able to help her and, of course, Annabelle's name sprung to mind.

They scheduled their tutoring sessions for late every Friday afternoon, became better acquainted with each other and after a few sessions Amber invited Annabelle to go clubbing with her. It quickly became something of a work-hard, play-hard habit. A habit that soon spread into the weekend and eventually more nights than not.

Annabelle confided what she could in Amber. Nothing about her real purpose at Harvard nor where and how she had spent every hour of what would have been a typical college student's free time over the last two and a half years but about her insecurities and parts of her history. Her ugly duckling phase, her treatment in high school and her complete lack of social life to date. And her sorrow over the death of someone she could now reluctantly admit that she had seen as more than a friend even if his heart had belonged to someone else.

Amber listened patiently and urged her to embrace life rather than dwell on death. Annabelle was a stunning young woman now - or was when she planned on a night at the clubs - and Amber understood the awkwardness of never having been the subject of male attention and suddenly being capable of turning every head in a room. Amber encouraged her, pushed her to get out and live, introduced her to people until Annabelle was much more comfortable introducing herself, and listened to plans, anxieties and stories of first kisses and first everything-else through a four month whirlwind of everything Annabelle had not previously experienced in her young life.

Amber only had two rules: don't do anything you don't want to do and do absolutely everything you _do_ want to do.

Annabelle was just so incredibly tired. Tired of the endless training and studying, tired of the anxiety over what was to come, tired of grieving her dead friend and tired of dwelling on her own likely similar fate. She eventually decided that, since she had the opportunity, she was going to live a little while it was still possible. With no clear mental picture of her future, she focused on the present. She allowed herself to become lost in the pumping bass of the clubs and the physical exertion it brought with it. She had lost one dance partner but found many others. It wasn't much in the way of a tribute of any kind but it did make her forget for a while.

Being roughly halfway between her eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays Annabelle was underage but even a fake ID was never required. Alcohol flowed freely and later Amber started offering her little pink pills to help them keep dancing until the club closed. She initially refused, eliciting a simple shrug from Amber, but eventually relented on occasion.

Amber wasn't interested in relationships, pointing out to Annabelle that they would both be moving on soon and didn't need any puppy dogs dragging them down. Annabelle was secretly amused by just how accurate that sentiment was. _Nos morituri te salutamus_, she morbidly thought in her less guarded moments.

She was vaguely aware that all of this training was building up to some kind of end. One likely resulting in a drastically reduced life expectancy. But she felt unburdened in these moments - fueled by loud music, alcohol and other relatively mild drugs and the attentions of her dance partners. It wasn't long before she was following Amber's lead and leaving the club with the eager and undeniably attractive men they had met there. First as a wingman and soon thereafter working up the nerve to choose a lucky few to escort her home with admonitions from Amber to not do anything she wouldn't do. Which was a remarkably low bar.

She did as much or as little with them as she wanted at that particular moment in time. Her first was tall and lanky, sweet and funny. She chose him deliberately because he seemed to think he had no chance with her and she was pretty sure she utterly broke his heart without even meaning to. But she knew she was on borrowed time and had no future to offer. A few never bothered her again and she never met up with any of them more than three or four times over no more than two weeks. Amber supplied the script for the more persistent ones as well - something she now realized would likely be true as long as she was a part of the world she was being trained to join: _I'm just not looking for anything serious right now_.

Her general exhaustion was impossible to hide but it was infinitely better than the vague depression she had felt herself slipping into prior to meeting Amber. Even so her instructors noticed the change and told her to get her shit together. That she had her fun and it was time to get back to work. In late February she did her time in hospital and in mid-March her assignments increased again. Sure enough, Portuguese was easily mastered and she cut her and Amber's outings back to their previous Friday only schedule.

She and Amber's Friday evenings became more sedate, Amber told of her plans to travel to France after graduation but Annabelle was vague about her own plans. Annabelle had been told by her instructors to be ready...that she had excelled thus far and they were nearly done with the appetizers and ready for the final stages of her training as an Agent.

Annabelle's concerns about how to cut ties with her new friend were preempted when Amber told her she had to devote more time to catching up on her report for a major research project she was working on for a psychology course. Annabelle still occasionally saw her in passing around campus but Friday night dinners had thankfully been replaced with cramming for courses and Amber seemed to only return Annabelle's few messages with messages of her own when Annabelle was unreachable during her training. The two simply slipped out of each others' lives.

Annabelle Harvey died April 12, 2001 struck by a drunk driver in a Super Duty pickup truck a few weeks before her commencement. Her yellow, convertible Volkswagen Rabbit - bought from a girl in California three years ago according to public records - was obliterated. Mangled beyond recognition. The remnants of the vehicle had caught fire and Annabelle surprisingly had no available dental records but the distinctive vehicle was widely known to belong to her.

The college honored a request by her patron for no remembrance or special mention out of respect for the privacy of Annabelle's similarly fabricated family but she remains something of a legend amongst the faculty.

Amber Reynolds disappeared the same day and has no record of ever attending Harvard University.

.

* * *

York County, VA; Sat Apr 14, 2001 9:15 am

.

What with one thing and another, three years passed.

Annabelle, Lydia and Sloan had kept quite busy - Sloan training in between Annabelle's classes and study sessions and vice versa. Both gave way one weekend per month to Lydia and her driving, flying and tactical assault training. For some training missions she was someone else entirely. In all her guises, she loved the learning itself and being so good at something and felt a rush of pride when she contemplated that she was being groomed for an important role in bringing justice to the world. She may have missed out on some of the experiences her fellow students enjoyed but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make for the greater good. To be something better.

It wasn't exactly fulfilling but she was glad that she had been granted a brief period when she had been able to create a tiny pocket universe where she had attempted to squeeze the most fun and life affirming activities she was comfortable with allowing herself into the little time that she had available before becoming a non-person. She decided then and there that would be the extent of her self-indulgence. In the male dominated world of espionage she had worked too hard and sacrificed too much to allow anyone any indications that anything she achieved was done on her back.

Nearly every waking moment of her life had been scheduled for her over those three years. Punctuated by occasional simple missions under a variety of aliases limited to simple reconnaissance and surveillance or stealth infiltrations (which she prided herself as being quite good at but preferred to think of more honestly as burglaries).

After some of these missions she was required to report to Graham himself at his official Langley office and review her development. There she assumed her 'Alpha alias' of Sarah Walker. The name he had granted her upon her recruitment was the most seldom used of her recurring identities but also drew no attention when she was there or at his other office in DC. She assumed her various covers perfectly and these 'trial missions' whetted her appetite for the life of adventure that Deputy Director Graham had promised.

After a short flight, a car with a driver who refused to speak or respond to her picked her up at the airport early that morning. There was an ominous, unsigned handwritten note on the back seat saying simply: _Time to earn your keep_.

Two days after the deaths of Annabelle Harvey and Lydia Blake and three days after the disappearance of Sloan Gershon, two months shy of her actual nineteenth birthday, a by-all-accounts twenty-one year old woman with shoulder length hair - its natural blonde muted to a light brown - named Stacy Mills arrived at what outwardly appeared to be a run-down complex of farm buildings in rural Virginia.

The more traditionally recruited candidates reported to the nearby, more widely known CIA training facility less-than-affectionately referred to as The Farm.

This highly classified and seldom utilized secondary training location seemed a better fit for that name but this location was reserved to sequester recruits for special projects. It's official operational designation was a 10-digit number but those few trainees sent here almost all independently came to refer to it simply as The Facility.

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END OF LINE

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A/N2: Story Notes (aka 'I should start a blog')

There was a lot about seductions in Ch 1 but it is so heavily leveraged and alluded to in S1 I wanted to establish some boundaries and expectations right from the off and let people decide for themselves if they can stomach it rather than blindsiding anyone later. Spoiler Alert: I never intend to portray Sarah as engaging in an extreme seduction but I didn't want to simply declare it so or artificially insulate her from such things. Once its introduced there are many potential treatments and now you have seen the bare bones of most of them. It's an abusive concept and will always be treated as such.

Ch 2 begins to dispel the notion that any mother would knowingly 'allow' her daughter to run around the country with her known con man of a father (more on this will be gradually revealed but not for a while after the prologue). Canon gently encourages us to assume that Sarah (completely unnamed here) kept up at least some contact with her mother prior to these events and told Emma about Molly's full story off-camera - or at least clarified this plausible misconception - but I treat neither as true. In honor of Cheryl Ladd (of _Charlie's Angels_ fame), yes, that was an implied CATs sighting.

And Ch 3 covers another purpose of this prologue - to address how (and later _why_) she is so highly trained. A side effect was addressing some lingering fanon assumptions (based on old NBC website 'spy dossiers' - since removed / redacted (snicker)) that create the impression that Graham dropped a prized recruit off at Harvard for four years with some spending money and all expenses paid and let her have a normal college experience out of the goodness of his heart. (The CIA is/was known to recruit extensively at Ivy League schools but we later found out even in canon he got his hooks into her much earlier.)

I have seen the _concept_ of an 'Alpha alias' floating around before but I've only ever seen that particular _term_ first used by atcDave on the _Chuck This_ forum so credit goes to him for that!

The FBI's packet sniffer 'Carnivore' (later renamed the more palatable DCS1000 but doing _exactly_ the same thing - ostensibly differentiating between Internet communications that can and cannot be lawfully intercepted) and its commercial replacement, NarusInsight (N.I.) could/can be used to monitor email and other Internet traffic. The idea of somehow less-lawfully extending such a thing into intercepting or analyzing voice communications is pure speculation on my part.

Finally, I emphasized Sarah's youth during her training ad nauseam to provide anchors to my complicated timeline spanning nearly three years and three different primary training identities. I'll be glad to finally start calling her 'Sarah' rather than referring to her by four different names in Chapters 1 & 3 and no name whatsoever in Chapter 2 but in the case of her age I am not taking liberties with canon (much).

The closest thing to a canon birth _month_ is actually in a file on Gertrude Verbanski's desk ('Bearded Bandit'; episode 5.02) - although Sarah never explicitly confirms it and the report goes on to state (if you press 'pause' and can read upside-down - a handy spy skill I possess) that they have zero confidence that anything in the report is accurate - so I tweak it by a month for two inconsequential reasons. (You won't notice the first one until I gift wrap the second one in a few chapters.)

Assuming Gertrude and I are close - not personally, but on this topic - Sarah is nine months younger than Chuck (eight if you choose to believe Gertrude) and, based on events of 'Cougars' her father must have seriously tweaked her records. I declare it was to such a degree that even Verbanski Corp. didn't completely unravel the truth.

I emphasize all this because most fans do not immediately realize that if the dates basically hold up, _even in canon_, despite presumably being a high school senior or how old anyone _thinks_ she is, when Graham recruits her she is still _fifteen_ years old.

(As a side-note - to a side-note, I suppose - I've always found it odd that Chuck's 'quarter-life crisis' birthday party - occurring last night as of the events of Ch 2 - is actually his 26th rather than 25th. Apparently 104 is the denominator. It reminds me of Daffy Duck as Robin Hood with his 'buck-and-a-quarter quarterstaff'...)

SERE is Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. Level C is for captives more 'likely to be exploited' but with POW status that a disavowed spy is unlikely to have.

See you in two weeks for another double-feature!


	3. III: Jenny

...in which a government agent receives an update on recent suspicious activity before receiving the details of her next assignment and a look back at the day she and the current Director first met...

Canon Reference: occurring simultaneously with early events of 'Intersect' (aka the Pilot, episode 1.01) via a flashback scene from 'Baby' (episode 5.08) and REPLACES the final flashback scene of that episode; flashback elements of 'Cougars' (episode 2.04)

Contents: OMG! A manageable installment? Maybe... This installment is 11K words consisting of two medium-length chapters (Ch 4-5); 4,700 and 6,300 words, respectively - the second broken into two distinct sections (although it's not labelled 5a and 5b).

A/N: On this Memorial Day, please join me in thanking the brave men and women of our armed forces - and their families - who have sacrificed so much in the defense of freedom and liberty around the world. Although this story plays fast and loose with the nature of the fictional versions of certain intelligence and law enforcement agencies, that respect and thanks extends to the less heralded members of our Intelligence Community and others who have made similar sacrifices.

Disclaimers / Easter Eggs: The author has derived no income or other profit from this work. No ownership or claim is asserted or implied to the characters or story of the television show CHUCK or the movie _Tron_ in this or any other part; additionally in this part no ownership or claim to Chumbawamba's _Tubthumping_ (its not _MY_ fault) or Metallica's _Wherever I May Roam_ (may as well use a piece of it again for a title) is asserted or implied.

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Part III: Jenny

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004: To the Game You Stay a Slave

Interstate 5, Northbound, 30 miles north of Los Angeles; Wed Sept 19, 2007, 1:25 pm

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The agent had hoped to tell her mother more of the situation. More of what she had done for her country. The sacrifices she had made. Something to make her mother proud of her. But she quickly realized that there was little she could share with her mother that fit the definition of '_things you hope for your children_'.

At least she had once attended a prestigious university and excelled there although her mother would find no trace of the girl she once knew in any graduation photo. And she had learned a trade. Of sorts. A trade at which her peers considered her among the absolute best. Although they attributed that honor to a variety of aliases and code names she had grown to hate rather than to her most frequently recycled name. It was an unfortunately necessary trade. She realized that now. But it was one of which she doubted her mother - or anyone, really - would be proud.

She had retrieved her Porsche from a warehouse-garage of an acquaintance early that morning. She had been fortunate to get on one of the few flights into Tijuana on Aeromexico from Shanghai Pudong hoping most of the attention of any pursuers would be divided or devoted entirely to the more traditional western routes. She had hidden her blonde hair under a dark wig from her kit that matched one of her passport photos. It helped her not stand out quite so much and she hid half of her face behind oversized but reasonably fashionable sunglasses.

The choice of route was a balancing act between two threats. The positive was that even the CIA - or any contacts within the CIA to whom Ryker might still have access - wouldn't be as inclined - or even _able_ - to acquire the security footage from the Chinese government-controlled airport in trying to cast a surveillance net to determine her whereabouts.

The negative was that if she were caught in the People's Republic of China there was no possible way she could escape with the baby. If it were a problem with the usual airport presence of the PAP she could likely save herself but she would have to abandon the child. If it were agents from the MSS - and especially if they connected her to that nasty business in Shenzhen - it would simply be the end of her.

It turned out the baby herself was a better disguise than anything she could have thrown together. And that was a fortunate thing because caring for the baby had kept her attention divided from scanning for threats for the brief five hours they spent in the Shanghai International airport waiting for their flight. So much so that she was mildly startled when the time had passed and boarding for her flight to Tijuana was announced and the danger of such an impossible decision had passed.

Jesus Santos was the son of an old friend of her father although there had been some sort of a falling out many years ago. Due to her drastically in her appearance he took a little bit of convincing when she had first returned to his home headquarters near Tijuana several years ago. But when she called him 'Uncle Chuy' his face lit up with recognition. He was in that grey area of an old brother or a young uncle but, as his father treated her own father like one of his own sons during their brief time here years ago, she had settled on 'uncle'. And, even now, he persisted in calling her 'little Jenny'.

He hadn't questioned the need to hide a fairly valuable, high performance sports car for future use - and keep it in good condition and legal compliance for her return - nor would he inform her father or anyone else of her new passenger. Chuy's wife, Angelina, had given her a break from watching the baby to let her clean herself up. Unfortunately, the only change of clothes she had with her was mission gear and nothing Angelina had offered to lend to her would fit.

Angelina was as tiny as the agent remembered from her childhood despite giving birth to four children since then. Angelina had been seventeen when she herself was nearly fourteen and a younger her had idolized her for her beauty and confidence. Although Angelina and Chuy - twenty-two at the time and just establishing himself in preparation for taking over both his father's legal and illegal enterprises - weren't yet dating at the time, they had an aura of inevitability about them.

She had hoped that one day someone would look at her with the raw adoration with which she had seen Chuy look at Angelina. The way he still looked at her. And dared to dream that she would one day be as happy as Angelina seemed.

Be as happy as she seemed then when the younger incarnation of the agent had first known her. When Angelina had been working as a scout as much as a car boost, frequenting the ritzier nightclubs in LA and San Diego, occasionally as far away as Las Vegas for a specific target, where she planted short-range tracers on the more exotic cars driven by foolish men with too much money. Chuy always insisted on accompanying her, sometimes helping her extricate herself from the company of men who responded poorly to a reversal in the signals she was giving, and they got to know one another while they tailed their quarry to set up a later grab.

Sometimes opportunities presented themselves quickly and they dropped a new acquisition off at the family's San Diego garage before daybreak with her usually easily convincing him to let her drive the exotic car. Sometimes they went out for breakfast together with her still in her clubbing attire - relentlessly teasing him and drawing stares at the seeming couple from other patrons until he visibly blushed to her delight. Pretending they were dating or enjoying a meal after an evening together until one inevitable morning when both were true.

Or her younger self would have hoped to be as happy as Angelina seemed now, having left all that behind - except for the man who adored her - in favor of raising a family with him. The agent was exhausted from the attention the baby required at regular intervals day or night and from their escape from Eastern Europe. The result had been a handful of fractured hours of sleep over the past three days but she somehow wasn't tired watching the scene before her.

Angelina looked elegant and graceful in a simple, white sundress holding court for her own youngest son and daughter playing around her, constantly seeking her approval for one thing or another. The older boy and girl were kicking a weathered soccer ball between them and she periodically reminded them to include their younger siblings, deftly kicking the ball back to her oldest son and daughter after the younger two had fumbled about for a bit or lost interest. All this while she fed a bottle of formula to the baby girl temporarily in her care, cradling her effortlessly in one arm as she cooed and soothed her.

The couple had embraced the absurd theme of Chuy's full name coupled with hers when they started having children, giving the whole family similarly angelic or saintly names and they lived up to them on this visit. Criminals or not, they were good people. Despite her hastily made plans, she entertained the idea of leaving the baby with them. She knew she would be loved here but it would invite too many questions.

Instead she accepted Angelina's enthusiastic advice, misguided congratulations and dozens of used baby items of which she said she had no further need. She said four was enough but Chuy's unsolicited "but you never know" resulted in one of those transcendent looks and secret smiles between the two of them. A look that prompted her to only accept the items for which she had an immediate use. They even provided an old infant car seat that had to be wedged into the front passenger seat of the tiny sports coupe.

She could just as easily have stored her car at the CIA's Los Angeles substation as Chuy's chop shop but was glad she hadn't. Graham must know that she often popped back up on the radar in or around San Diego but, if so, he also must have, somewhat uncharacteristically, made the simplistic assumption that she had a vague nostalgic affinity for the area or even old friends she visited.

As the place where he had first interacted with her it may have been a common assumption for most recruits so she tried to spread her footprint around to avoid any concentrated scrutiny and used the opportunity to maintain her network of contacts. Besides doing late night drive-bys of her mothers house - never able to bring herself to stop, much less knock on the door - this was the reason. Like a few other cities throughout North America, she had people there or nearby. Old contacts that she knew she could trust or at least knew how _far_ she could trust.

But Chuy and his family had seen the baby and would have to be stricken from that list. As always, she disgusted herself by even entertaining the tactical option of orphaning their four children. The kids were strictly off limits as far as she was concerned but the _option_ still existed for someone somewhere. Making the children untouchable meant that there was a scenario more extreme than this one where the parents were not. And that realization sickened her.

She told herself it was just part of a checklist, a mechanical process, something that someone far more twisted than her had conceived, only part of her consciousness due to relentless training, as she waved goodbye to the enthusiastically waving family. A beautiful, perfect family she had just consciously - if automatically - weighed the tactical advantages and disadvantages of killing some or all of. She wondered when even _considering_ such options for even the briefest amount of time had started making any degree of sense to her.

As the woman and child later crossed the border uneventfully, it was just one more reason for her to begin the mental process of erasing Chuy and his family from her memory. Allocating them to the closed file of the now non-existent Nicole Schroeder.

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* * *

That was who she had been several hours ago - a woman crossing the border with her infant daughter. Now she was attempting to complete the process of safely locking away any memory of the mother she once had and the child she had known for three days and risked everything to provide with a new start.

It wasn't quite as effective as it had been earlier in her career but it still felt as though it had all happened to someone else.

Embracing the role of a carefree, motherless, childless woman - two of the three being true - the agent thought she might just keep driving north for a while. Maybe veer west until the world became water and drive lazily up the PCH and spend some time in San Francisco or Monterey. She was trained to function on little sleep but utter exhaustion was starting to set in.

Their route had started in Budapest with an early morning drive to Vienna, and subsequent flights to Istanbul, Bangkok, Shanghai and Tijuana. But the roar of the engine and the wind in her hair energized her just enough to become hopeful she could stay awake until she could find somewhere to collapse and let the events of the last few days fully wash over and through her. A hot bath and a long nap were competing for the top priority in her life right now. Sleeping in that hot bath was looking like a fantastic compromise if not an inevitability.

She loved to drive but hadn't seen her car for over six months. It was her first and last splurge purchase - one of the first 997s available - when she realized how much pay she had accumulated living basically expense free with no fixed address while on assignment after assignment for several years. The realization that she hardly ever got to drive the car and that there was really no good place to keep it had prevented her from splurging on anything else - and Chuy had always said he could arranged for a car anywhere in North America with two days notice - a crutch she may still have at her disposal as long as she didn't deal with him directly. She smiled when she noticed that Chuy had updated her stereo without any mention of doing so and resigned herself to the idea of having to store the car at a local substation when she was next deployed. And then wondered if she should even keep it considering she no longer had any ties to the area.

She had achieved her primary goal of putting some distance between herself and San Diego, just leaving Los Angeles behind her half an hour ago, so she reactivated her official encrypted phone and it rang almost immediately. It was one of those rare occasions where she had to think for a split-second about how to answer.

"Walker...secure."

"Damn it, Walker. Where the fuck have you been for the past four days?" She immediately registered several things: the confirmation that her name had, in fact, been restored to its default setting of Sarah Walker, that Graham was pissed enough to dispense with the formality of confirming his line was encrypted and that someone in the background was calling out to Graham - probably an analyst providing her location. That last thought was quickly confirmed. "And what are you doing in California? You should have reported directly to me when you reentered the country."

"Sorry, sir. I decided to take a roundabout way back to the States and lay some false trails to throw Ryker off until I knew what I was dealing with. Figured LA was as unhelpful of a data point as any major city." This was about as true as she was sorry - which was to say not at all of either. And this line of questioning was making her think about the woman and child she could still envision in the rear-view mirror, sabotaging her efforts to compartmentalize.

She had been surprised how little attention was paid to the small child while traveling commercial. If you weren't paying for a seat, the airline didn't seem to care very much. She had scrambled to get high-quality passports for the little girl that matched some of her own from a somewhat shady contact in Vienna just in case someone had given it any amount of scrutiny but she needn't have worried. With similar brazenness, Ryker could have taken the baby anywhere in the world just as easily as she had. She had stolen the first car she found with a serviceable baby seat, actively avoiding rail stations and airports where Ryker may have informants or associates.

She had burned three of her unsponsored identities to get herself and the baby back to California, only superficially adopting each cover. It had always been easier to put on a new identity that Graham had worked up for her with a detailed personality profile. They had worked on it very early in her training. When they put in the small additional effort of walking through a few key parameters of a cover it was like flipping a switch. More immersive than she had been capable of as a child. As though she were playing a version of herself she had only just discovered.

She had trained herself to do the same thing on the fly out of necessity later in her training. But without a specific character template she sometimes found it harder to stifle her unproductive, scattered thoughts and make the necessary mental adjustments on the fly to...whatever she was without such character sketches.

Whatever she was underneath all the secret identities.

Whatever was left.

She was sure it had not escaped Graham's attention that none of her sponsored aliases had been flagged by The Agency and she wasn't going to point it out. She still had several more she was saving for the proverbial rainy day that he did not need to know about. People didn't usually survive rainy days in her business.

She decided to test the waters. She _had_ been off grid for several days which couldn't have looked very good considering what had resulted in her being dispatched to Budapest in the first place. And since her compartmentalization thus far of her recent experiences wasn't holding up very well she should determine how necessary it was. "Speaking of which, just what _am_ I dealing with? How much do you know about this so-called mission, sir?"

"Look, I know what Ryker made you do. I know everything." The Director answered smoothly and calmly.

She doubted that was entirely true but assumed that it _did_ mean that someone from The Agency had picked up Norman, aka the hacker calling himself 'Spider', and had fully vetted the same story he had told to her. It was a bit of an operational nightmare. Now that she knew what Ryker had been after she doubted that he had fully evaluated or cared about the repercussions of her eliminating half of the leaders of the Hungarian underworld. There was a power vacuum that would be filled and she cared about what that might mean to US interests in the region only in a purely academic way. But Graham was usually _very_ interested in those types of outcomes and the resultant political pressures he would have to deal with.

"I was just obeying orders." she responded as vaguely as she could and waited for the thunder.

"There's no need to worry about that now. Where's the package?"

_No need to worry?_ How very unlike Graham. He worried about everything. She expected him to focus on the ramifications of what she had done on the stability of the region or at least her failure to identify the rogue nature of the assignment. Some technical aspect over any importance attributed to the individuals who had been murdered or kidnapped. But to dismiss the situation entirely was unusual.

Something was amiss and she suspected she had made the right call by opting not to offer up details so she continued to probe. "If I had the package in my possession, then what?"

_The Package._ Repeating the euphemism that Ryker had used to describe the tiny, perfect soul who had forced her to look far too deeply at her own actually hurt to say. Leaving her mother behind was so fresh a wound that she hadn't even been aware that leaving the child had inflicted another. Having seen Angelina with her own children, this new wound was surprisingly just as deep.

She had a fleeting rogue thought that she should have kept her and ran away from all of this madness...and she stamped that thought out as quickly as she could. The child was much better off far from someone like her.

"CIA would take it into custody and then…" _It?!_

"Could you guarantee its protection?" she uncharacteristically interjected. There was a slight possibility that Graham was keeping things vague for security purposes - he _was_ the most paranoid person she had ever met. She had feigned disinterested detachment potentially encouraging its use - but it still required a conscious effort on her part to resist the urge to contemptuously emphasize the impersonal pronoun he had chosen for that beautiful baby girl.

And she still wanted to know what, if any, plans Graham had for the baby. His placating tone alone, rather than reprimanding her for interrupting, was worrisome.

"You know I can't make guarantees. The CIA keeps records of these kind of things. Records that a man like Ryker might be able to get his hands on. Who knows what he would do. He's a wild card..."

She had cringed at the mention of a wild card and was struck silent for a moment. That was once one of her many handles. Occasionally it still was. No one knew exactly how many agents Graham had recruited into his special project but some overheard call signs, gossip travelled and many liked to joke - far away from Graham's earshot - that he wasn't playing with a full deck. Even so, no one joked about the call sign 'Wild Card'.

Due to some problems with fully executing her orders early in her career, she had begun with an unimpressive designation of Seven of Spades based purely on raw ability. Only after she made her deal and began cleaning up messes for him did she eventually work her way up to more dramatic designations, later moving off the scale entirely into the role of Wild Card. When Graham said those two little words together and a folder found its way into her hands, people were about to die.

And there had been a lot of folders.

But she was also no fool. She knew someone offering an out when she saw it. Graham's response indicated that Ryker was still out there somewhere. How long he could remain at large was a question mark and she hated question marks. But he would have to stay off the grid or possibly do freelance work or imbed himself in some organization that would make going after him too costly in both money and lives. Any of those options would take time and effort and consume his focus for the conceivable future. It did trouble her that he couldn't guarantee protection. Just what the hell was going on that made the CIA unable to protect a civilian from their own rogue agents?

It was apparent to her that Graham was fully aware that she had taken the child and found somewhere to keep her safe. He had no way of knowing whether she had done so somewhere in Europe, somewhere in the US or somewhere in between. She saw no reason to change that or clarify any part of it. So she reluctantly closed the mental vault that held the precious memories of finally seeing her mother one last time and the baby girl that had shown her some light in the darkness and would give her mother another chance to raise a daughter she could be proud of. The chance she had taken from her mother when she was seven.

"... Agent Walker? ...Sarah?"

Graham's voice roused her from her musings and she emerged convinced she had made the right decision. So she did the one thing she did even better than what she had done in Budapest.

She lied.

She found the lie in the truth and sold the hell out of her new version of reality. Convincing even herself that she was unaffected and turning away from thoughts of the road not travelled.

"I'm not in possession of the package, Director. Must be somewhere else."

"Very well." Graham had no interest in the child herself considering what he was currently dealing with. And quite frankly he was impressed, but not terribly surprised, that his agent was able to flee with a small child in tow, evade capture and find a safe haven for the child in such a short period of time. He also briefly entertained the idea that the child had simply been disposed of but didn't think this particular protégé was quite that far gone just yet.

But this was all just humoring her while he assessed whether she was still _his_ agent and hadn't, as he had feared during her absence, gone rogue with Larkin and somehow been part of what happened last night. As it seemed he often did when it came to her, he had made a snap decision about how best to use her as soon as her location had been established.

Conveniently enough, her route had left her perfectly positioned to help him with his current predicament. He had the disadvantage of having very few qualified agents currently available in-country and the two available in LA were less than ideal. He had dragged his feet on calling either in for a briefing at the substation in LA until he had complete intel and he had just learned enough about Larkin's transmission for him to put two-and-two together. This unexpected serendipity would allow him to order both agents to stand down and avoid the substation while his best option got whatever support she needed.

This way he could still beat Beckman's attack dog to the field of operations with an attack dog of his own. Something that would not have been possible had she reported to Langley after the events of last night. One of his two agents might have been able to deal with Casey once he got his team in place but wouldn't have been nearly as artful about getting the answers he needed as Walker. And he really didn't need to start a full-scale war between agencies in the heart of Los Angeles.

He was relatively certain Agent Walker would want to handle this one personally anyway once he had fully explained the situation.

"As unfortunate as this business with Ryker is, I need you back into action right away. I have something that requires immediate attention in LA and your position indicates that you are the closest operative I have that I can trust with something this important."

She was relieved to hear him say that at least _he_ still trusted her. Trusted her with something big enough for him to press his luck and the limits of his authority with a domestic assignment. Sleep would have to wait. If she could pull off this urgent assignment - whatever it was - maybe he would be able to convince any other bigwigs who had taken an unhealthy interest in certain personas of hers just because of their affiliation with a rogue agent. "Credentials?"

"No time. I need you in there now. Just go in as Sarah Walker. It should be a quick in and out; twenty-four hours max. There's no need to establish a cover."

"What's the objective?"

"That's the bad news. We finally figured out what Bryce has been up to." Graham uncharacteristically sighed in anticipation of delivering the final piece of information he had yet to share.

She chuckled inaudibly at what she misinterpreted as exasperation in her superior's tone. Bryce had that effect on a lot of people. "And what half-assed excuse has he cooked up for where he's been for the past two..._three_...months?"

"Agent...Sarah..." There was that _tone_ again. What would have passed for compassion to anyone who didn't know him concerned her as he switched to address her by a more informal name for the second time in this conversation. It wasn't unheard of for him to address her informally but it was rare. And he always referred to her as Agent Walker or or 'Agent' coupled with the last name of her current alias in front of other agents. And he was consistent about it. She had also never known him to be so familiar about another agent in her presence.

Her frequent partner was a constant thorn in Graham's side and Graham had always - _always_ - without fail - referred to him as Agent Larkin, or simply Larkin. At least in front of her.

The hum of the engine and the rush of the wind it indirectly created were the only sounds as she quietly waited for the other shoe to drop with her hands at 10 and 2 watching the road ahead and anticipating the moves of the erratic drivers around her.

She felt a disquieting sense of dread as the pieces started to assemble in her mind when she realized that Graham had just referred to him simply as Bryce.

And then he did it again.

"...Bryce is dead."

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005: Run, Rabbit, Run

San Diego, CA; Friday, March 20, 1998, 4:25 pm

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Jenny Burton - a senior at James Buchanan High School - was driving home with the top down and the radio up with her hands at 10 and 2 watching the road ahead and anticipating the moves of the erratic drivers around her. She loved her bright yellow Volkswagen Rabbit even though it was older than she was. She knew it had been a bribe when they had moved here and her father had given it to her but she now accepted it as hers. She was always extra cautious because, along with the car, he had given her a drivers license and registration and the only thing they had in common with Jenny Burton was a passable resemblance to the girl in the picture on the license. She had three more drivers licenses in a pouch inside a slit in the passenger seat upholstery.

Jenny was enjoying letting the wind blow wildly through her hair and looking forward to spring break. She had just finished her mid-term exams and felt pretty confident she had done well in all of them. Last year she had come in without proper records and had to take several courses well below her level of ability until her records came through. Meaning until her father came through with official looking enough fakes.

They had been particularly reluctant to let her take two foreign languages so she simply refused to speak English for several weeks. Switching to Spanish was so commonplace that some people didn't even notice at first. As soon as they realized her proficiency, she switched to French. She was nearly as good at French and she had fewer people to impress. Both teachers thought it was delightful but the student's reactions were not as enthusiastic when they were then encouraged to speak only in the language they were learning during class.

Her math and science results were only slightly above average but she was able to test out of any further requirements in either for her senior year. Her father must have come through with some pretty decent records for her, leaving only a couple of areas requiring additional credits, because she was able to avoid those less preferred subjects and was pretty well set for her approaching graduation.

She had played violin twice in her life previously. Once for nearly half of a school year where she quickly became reasonably good and again for two months some time later which was more than enough time to restore her proficiency. She decided to pick it up again over the summer to fulfill an arts requirement in her final year, becoming quite good rather quickly. She had always enjoyed learning about history and was able to test into an Advanced Placement class which meant her school day in her senior year was made up of three AP classes (world history, Spanish and French), orchestra, English literature and Physical Education.

As she drove home she considered what she might do with a week alone in case her father didn't come through. She hadn't seen him in a few weeks but he had promised to be back for spring break. Maybe he had something fun planned. It would be nice to spend a little time together to help her decide what she wanted to do after graduation.

Things were getting better between them when he was home - which was somewhat infrequently but she could look out for herself. At least he had helped her get set up here and came through on his promise of helping her establish the 'Jenny Burton' identity needed to attend school.

She didn't know how he pulled it off but for once he had kept most of his promises. He must have finally seen her point of view on the events that had led them to this point and clearly felt some guilt over how she had perceived things. He even sheepishly offered to set her up with a clean identity in case she wanted to strike out on her own.

But he had also suggested that maybe they could make a go of it, maybe even legitimately for a while, as Jack and Jenny Burton. Implicitly admitting that life as criminals might mot be the best plan for a man with a young daughter was a big step for him. Even as he acknowledged to himself that it was his fault she had to grow up so fast, he wanted her to stay at least until she was a little older. To tell the truth, Jenny was hoping to spend some time enjoying her youth even though their acceleration of her life on paper gave her lots of options. That had been the whole point of this failed high school experiment after all.

He said he would wrap up what he was working on in LA and between that haul and their emergency stash they could last a couple of years no matter what happened. Enough time to at least carry on until she truly reached her eighteenth birthday two years from this coming June. She was considering the option of leveraging the eighteenth birthday of 'Jenny' coming up this May - the date they had long ago established as her new birthday for her last eight birthdays only recently changing the year. He had also proposed possibly going to see her mother once her _true_ self was no longer a minor. An idea that absolutely terrified her.

He was trying. He really was. Ever since she had demanded to be left out of his cons and to be allowed to try to have some normalcy in her life he had tried to give her options and make up for what she now knew to have been a misunderstanding that had caused the rift between them. They settled down in one place. Or rather she did. Dad was gone more than he was around. He had gotten the braces for her teeth they had discussed since she was twelve. He made her over two years older on paper and no one seemed to question it. That meant she would soon get to choose how she wanted to live. She got to attend a normal high school as a normal girl and was even starting to befriend a few other girls last year as what would be her junior year came to a close.

As she drove, Jenny rolled her eyes when she heard the dedication on the radio. Football season had been over for months and she smiled to herself when she thought maybe she should ask Heather Chandler whether she had dedicated the song to the whole varsity team because she couldn't remember which ones she had fucked.

Of course she never would and her smile faded as she realized that. Even though evidence of the reason for Heather's popularity was tipping the balance more toward well-established fact than mere rumor, Heather would just turn the tables focusing on the fact that Jenny didn't have any boys that were interested in her. Heather had seen to that.

And it wasn't just Heather. All those girls were allied against her now, ultimately for things she didn't even realize she had done. Jenny's stunt to be allowed to take French had unknowingly taken attention away from Heather and exposed her as not being the star pupil she had been before she was forced to actually _use_ French in conversation. She hadn't said anything at the time but she had been embarrassed and hadn't forgotten.

When Jenny had taken up violin again she hadn't known that Heather played as well and was second chair. When Jenny practiced a bit and auditioned over the summer she didn't even know until the school year started that she had bumped Heather down. But Heather knew.

Late in the previous year, girls she thought were or might become her friends - or at least didn't hate her - had encouraged Jenny to try out for the cheer leading squad. She had gone away with her father early in the summer to help him with what he described as a minor con setting up an office in LA as some sort of financial consultant and a small apartment where he had been spending most weeknights.

When Jenny had come back and gone to try-outs late in the summer she knew she had done at least as well as most of the other girls. But the new captain of the squad had final say and ripped her to pieces. Given a little bit of power, Heather was determined not to let Jenny show her up again and to pay her back for what she regarded as previous slights. She was the new queen bee and all of the other girls had fallen in line. None of her so-called friends had backed her up.

And that was why she was looking forward to spring break. Heather and her cronies had teamed up on her within the first few weeks and recruited their equally popular boyfriends to do the same. With the popular kids constantly teasing her no one else dared to stick up for her, hang out with her or even eat lunch with her. Most joined in to try to curry favor with the top of the JBHS Cougars food chain. Boys who had at least been nice to her last year - even if none of them were actually interested in dating her - now wouldn't even speak to her. She had previously been considering trying out for track but, with most of the boys track team also being on the football team, she realized quickly how big a mistake that would be.

She had become a pariah.

But spring break meant a whole week without dealing with any of that garbage and in twelve weeks she would be done with all of them forever. She had stuck quietly and diligently to her school work and began to entertain the idea of starting to work with her father again. It would all have been so much worse if she hadn't known that she had some options. She and her father had even discussed possibly starting out at a community college to see if she was interested in trying to get into a four-year school under the clean identity he had set up for her though he encouraged her to take some time off before doing so.

He had no doubts she could work her way into a great school. But he wasn't worried about academics, he just didn't think his little girl was ready for the social aspects that he fixated on. He knew he was probably being foolish and overprotective and really had no right to be either given what had broken their partnership over a year ago. He knew he had been a horrible father.

Maybe, just like over eight years ago, he just wasn't willing to let go of her. Unlike then, he thought maybe he would be able to be less selfish - be more attentive and more supportive. Rather than long periods where he threw himself into working on some con because he couldn't look at his daughter without being overwhelmed by the guilt of the circumstances that led him to take her from her mother.

Unable to part with her and unable to embrace her.

Jenny decided to sing along with Heather's catchy but stupid song considering and smiling at the fact that soon she wouldn't have to put up with Heather or her cronies anymore. She _had_ been knocked down but now had some hope of getting up again.

But as she pulled onto her street she saw the small army of county police and ATF officers milling about the yard with the lights on at least four vehicles flashing. There was a nondescript SUV as well and a stoic caucasian man - built like a tank and dressed in a black suit and dark glasses - coming down her front steps and looking her way before speaking into the cuff of his sleeve. A man she had noticed on the grounds of her school recently.

All she could think was that this was all her fault. They had never stayed in one place for so long. She thought it was what she wanted but the last few months had been miserable. Her father told her that she deserved that diploma, that she had earned it. Even though they could have easily faked her records if she ever needed a piece of paper. She had stayed to try to do something the right way even if she had been ready to abandon this whole experiment months ago. This was the result of her foolishness.

They always had plans for something like this - here in San Diego it was a stash well off the walking trails in the wooded part of a nearby park - but never had to use them except for the few times when he had simply disappeared for too long. There had been a lot of near misses but he had never actually been _caught_ before. Because she had always been watching his back before.

He had done all this for her. Settled them down, tried to give her a taste of a normal life, tried to prepare them for an attempt at a legitimate lifestyle based on his recent comments. Tried to make up for what a shit father he said he had been for most of their travels together. For her. And look where it landed him.

When she saw the officers escorting her handcuffed father out of the house and into the backseat of one of the police cars she pulled one of her knives from under her seat. She knew there was only one thing left that she could do.

So she ran. As fast as she could.

.

* * *

San Diego, CA; Friday, March 20, 1998, 5:05 pm

.

It had been a long time since Langston Graham had found himself skulking through the woods hunting another human being.

He was being cautious in his approach but not for the usual reasons. She had a rare gift and it was a skill missing among his other recruits and research subjects. He needed a linguist for his project. Not someone who had learned one or two languages through years of study, hard effort and immersion in a foreign culture but someone who could process languages and the learning of them almost intuitively.

He had been watching her for years. She was a child prodigy with an unharnessed intellect but no one but himself and a couple of his agents seemed to know or suspect it. She should have been in some sort of school for the gifted - which would have made her infinitely easier to keep tabs on, if harder to extricate, now that they were ready for her - but she was instead criss-crossing North America with her father.

They kept losing track of her but started having more success by tracking _him_. He was a proficient con artist but far too ambitious for his own good. That ambition had eventually become more aptly described as reckless and, more recently, downright sloppy.

The common element for the first four years of their surveillance had been the little girl lingering in the background. An agent had first noticed her in '92 while on an unrelated assignment as he scouted a market in Nogales. The agent had given a suspected age range but Graham kept what he had since discovered about the girl to himself - that his surveillance of her had begun when she was actually ten. Her blonde hair had stood out enough to draw the agent's attention, her behavior made him curious and he quickly realized what she was doing on the second day.

The agent had once done something similar himself - deliberately converting the book learning of a foreign language into a comfortable, functional skill through premeditated personal interactions.

She seemed to have a plan and approached each day working on a certain set of skills and adjusting based on her learnings. He could tell from the seemingly random flow of her conversation topics that she was targeting specific types of discussions with native speakers. Phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics - the daily improvement he observed in all of the five components of language was staggeringly efficient.

The CIA's carefully designed immersion program was similar and probably more robust, but her approach had a lot of shortcuts. It was as though she had studied the CIA's program and tailored it to herself. Such intuitive ability for an obvious infiltration skill was worthy of report and the agent was effusive in his praise of what he had observed. After his supplemental report was received and his original mission was concluded his primary mission became observing her.

She was a tiny, scrawny thing. The agent had estimated her to be maybe as young as nine years old but possibly an underdeveloped twelve year old. She was left to her own devices alone in the marketplace more often than not but everyone seemed to know not to accost her. The agent once saw a man grab her by the upper arm but the man cringed and yelped as he withdrew his hand and his friends laughed at him.

The girl just smiled at them all over her shoulder as she continued on her way. The agent was not certain whether he had truly seen a glint of metal during the interaction but the man's forearm was certainly bleeding.

His surveillance continued for three weeks until he lost her briefly in the crowd. He had the fleeting thought that she was now so easily confused for a native speaker that if she had changed her appearance she would be invisible. When he neared the end of the blocks-long row of merchant stalls - still surrounded by market-goers and peering over them on his tip-toes - he saw her.

She was standing in the doorway at the top of the front steps of the church across the street staring knowingly directly back at him. She smiled her crooked, toothy grin at him and gave a small finger-waggling wave before disappearing into the crowd again. She had been waving goodbye. He never saw her again.

The agent's commendation for identifying a potential high-value asset was offset by his reprimand for being detected by a pre-teen girl. But he made up for that mistake with his knowledge gleaned from vendors and other locals that the girl was traveling with her father.

Once that connection had been made between the two, and the girl's father had been identified, there had been light surveillance devoted to locating and tracking them ever since through a seemingly endless string of identities and con jobs of mixed success. Whenever the man currently calling himself Jack Burton popped on his radar, Deputy Director Graham's first question was always the same: _Where's the girl?_

Only recently had the answer become one of uncertainty. As always, the key had been the sloppiness of her father. 'Jack Burton' had run afoul of recently immigrated small-time crooks trying to carve out a foothold in Los Angeles. And he had interjected himself into an ill-fated deal between that group and a larger, much more well-established faction.

Graham was on good terms with one of the FBI agents on the case and had learned a few things. That Burton was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had changed his M.O. somewhat by deliberately keeping his hunting grounds so far from his home. And he had some prior dealings with the crooks the FBI and ATF were investigating but nothing that warranted their full attention. Or prevented Graham from interfering to exploit the situation.

One of Graham's two men had spotted her at her home and he sent both highly proficient former field agents to tail her and call in her location. He wanted to be the one who approached her but he was glad he didn't have to run her down himself. She had next to no technique but still ran like a fucking deer.

It wasn't often that Deputy Director Graham was surprised by anyone. Both he and the two agents with him had been sure that the girl couldn't possibly maintain her blistering pace when she took off into the woods and were surprised when she had. There hadn't been anything like that documented in her dossier since they had found her here in San Diego.

There was no indication of any special athletic ability whatsoever. She seemed to be acing her classes with minimal effort and her only extracurricular activity was music. She had tried out for the cheerleading squad last year but had not been accepted - creating the assumption that she simply wasn't athletic enough - and there was no indication that she socialized much with any of her peers ever since.

He found her using her bare hands to frantically dig up what must have been her and her father's stash of get away money and read a note inside the box. She surprised him yet again when a small but sturdy knife embedded itself in a tree inches from his head. He needed to take command of the situation so, after an appreciative huff, he acknowledged the feat with a condescending air and smooth, unimpressed tone speaking just two words.

"Nice toss."

It honestly had amused him as much as it surprised him - this frightened little rabbit launching a knife at him - revealing that it had longer and sharper teeth and claws than expected - or at least playacting as if she did. But he decided then and there that if she were to surprise him a third time, it would be on his terms.

She was street smart and resourceful not just pure, unfocused intelligence. He could tell from her facial structure that she didn't have to be as homely as she appeared - a side effect, he assumed, of both being raised by a man and simply not caring what others thought of her.

She was more fit and agile than he had expected based on their recent surveillance. It was no small accomplishment, especially for a civilian with no targeted training, to sprint nearly a mile and then turn and launch a knife with power and accuracy. Her reflexes and proficiency, if not technique, at that specific skill were already world class. He smiled more broadly as he watched the knife wobble from the force of the throw that had buried it in the tree bark as he considered what she could become with the proper training.

He was glad he hadn't farmed out this grab and had been here to witness it. He wouldn't have believed it had he been told - not enough to make the change in his course of action that he was now considering. She had far more untapped potential than even he had realized. In the few moments it took for the knife to fully come to rest he had decided that she wouldn't just be a research subject.

He could make her into an agent.

"Who are you?" The girl interrupted his thoughts and he contemplated how best to proceed. He could see her trembling, clutching the box to her chest and considering whether or not to make a mad dash away from him. They would have to work on that.

But she was working the options, assessing and calculating even though she was clearly terrified. She was no killer or she would currently be cleaning his blood from her blade. But he could work on that too. All he needed was the proper leverage.

So he began to assess her. To systematically feel her out and see which buttons worked best when pushed.

"I'm the man who put your father in prison. The question is: who are you? In San Diego, you go by Jenny Burton. In Wisconsin it's Katie O'Connell. In Cleveland it's Rebecca Franco. Funny thing is when I looked at your birth certificate..."

"I get your point. What do you want?" _Defiant, trying to wrest back some control of the situation..._Graham continued to assess her believing, incorrectly, that he had uncovered all her secrets. He knew all about the recent changes to her birth certificate. He had the one that came before. He hadn't overlooked the change in birth year. He just didn't care.

"Your father scammed some pretty dangerous people. I saved his life by putting him in jail."

"Well, don't expect a thank-you note." _Antagonize and read the reaction, hide your own true reactions..._yes, this decision was looking better and better...

"I can save your life too." She clearly read that as a threat of imprisonment - exactly as he had intended. Slowly extending her arms in position to be handcuffed but subtly shifting her stance. Now unarmed, she was trying to draw him in and attack him in some way. He couldn't help but smile at the raw audacity. Exactly what she planned to do next was a mystery and he was half tempted to play along to find out.

Instead he verbally retreated to draw her back in, physically holding his ground but softening his words. "No, not that way. Your dad trained you pretty well. The CIA can do even better. You like names so much, hmm? What do you think about Sarah Walker?"

"And who's Sarah Walker supposed to be?"

Graham hadn't really thought much about that yet. It was just a name he recalled from a few preset identities earmarked for recruiting purposes. Completely meaningless but he continued his sales pitch.

"The answer to _that_ question is yet to be written, but fundamentally..." Graham paused as he grasped the handle of the knife and wiggled it free of the tree "...she's someone who doesn't want to share her father's fate. A life of crime only ends one of two ways. You don't want to end up dead or in jail...you don't want that for yourself..._or_ your father. Do you?"

She stiffened, at her own possible fate or that of her father he hadn't been sure until he read her reaction to each. _There's the soft spot._ Graham could see that had hit the mark. So he suspected this latest half-assed attempt at living a normal life was her idea; attendance of high school while her father continued his grifter ways hinting at some sort of an attempt to improve herself. Indications of morality he could possibly exploit.

He further suspected the glimmer of hope in her eyes was related to the comment about her father not ending up in jail rather than herself. She still seemed to be under the delusion that she could escape his grasp.

He chose to try the high road first, the noble motivations before grabbing that soft spot and squeezing, so he broke out an old favorite as he weighed the knife in his right hand.

"The CIA can build on what you can already do. I have the authority to recruit you into an elite program. Give you a life, a purpose. You can have all the excitement and adventure you've had on your best cons with your father but do it while serving a higher purpose than yourself. You can become an agent of the US government. Serve the greater good."

The smirk that put on her face made Graham realize that she wasn't going to naively buy just any story and her response confirmed it. "What if Sarah Walker thinks you're full of shit?"

Graham was outwardly non-plussed but also no longer willing to dance this dance with a teenage girl. One pretending to be nearly eighteen but who he knew to be two years younger. She could choose to cooperate or not, but either way, he was at least getting what he came for no matter how young she was. He needed her skills and in six years of tracking her, he had yet to encounter anyone close to her ability. It had to be her. And she had already unwittingly signaled at least a willingness to take on an identity he prescribed by hypothetically asking questions as Sarah Walker.

But pretending he was here out of the goodness of his heart wasn't something this daughter of a con artist was going to blindly accept. Better to pull his best lever in an obvious way and let her appreciate the gravity of her situation while still making it sound like a reasonable request.

"Well, its all true. Adventure...Excitement...Traveling the world on the government's dime. But if that's not good enough for Sarah Walker, she also realizes that even though your father is going to prison, that doesn't mean that the men he conned can't reach him there..."

Graham paused deliberately as he saw the defiant girl who had gotten caught up in playing their little game of cat and mouse remember why she had fled in the first place.

And remember that she was the mouse.

He let the thought marinate for a moment longer as he drew a plain looking business card from an inner jacket pocket and tested the sharpness of the knife. He easily slit the center of the card with the point of the blade and slowly slid the card all the way to the knife's grip - the wound in the card widening as he plunged deeper - before continuing, raising his head abruptly from his strange task as though the thought had just occurred to him.

"Wouldn't it be a special type of karma if they actually ended up in the _same_ prison? Your father and the men he betrayed? The ones hunting him?" His attention returned to the card impaled on the knife as he continued with a shrug of his shoulders. "I put him in the safest place in the world...for now. But in a few months..."

The defiant girl's misty eyes gave it away. He knew he had found her weakness but she tried another feeble feint.

"What makes you think I care? I've got our money. Maybe all I care about is whether you're going to try to stop me."

"If I were going to _stop_ you..." _thunk!_

With a compact but powerful whipping motion from toes to fingertips ending with a flick of his wrist the knife had been returned to its owner, buried nearly an inch deep in the tree that marked her father's emergency funds. Graham wasn't far removed from field service and stayed in practice. He had thrown her knife hard enough to overcome the additional resistance of the card still seated where the blade ended.

Her fear became more obvious as she stared wide-eyed at this mysterious man offering to be some sort of benefactor while also contemplating the compact nature of the throw compared to her more showy overhand motion, the deliberately poorly veiled threat to her father and whatever the card contained in a sickening whirl of inevitable outcomes.

Now that he had her complete attention, Graham straightened his suit jacket sharply by its quarters and maintained his cool, steady tone feeling more comfortable that he could insinuate himself further into her reluctant confidence by giving her the illusion of a choice rather than demanding she leave with him immediately as he continued.

"...we wouldn't be talking. But if you want to walk away by all means, walk away. Your high school graduation is in twelve weeks. Over those twelve weeks there will be raids and arrests. Arraignments and legal maneuvering. Bail hearings and discovery motions. If a young woman calling herself Sarah Walker isn't at the reception desk at the address on that card at 9:00 am on June 15th it will become known that the man calling himself Jack Burton is the chief witness against the Leonov crime organization and that he is being moved to protective custody."

The girls features were pinched. She knew she was trapped. In more ways than one. And she was doing her level best not to tear up as Graham set the hook completely. "Of course, your father doesn't really know anything of value to us, so when we later remove him from the witness list they _may_ feel a great swell of affection thinking he has refused to betray them - or at least refused to betray them in open court. But they'll probably still be far too pissed about the $200,000 or so that he stole from them to let that affection get the better of them. But you can feel free to take _that_ cash..." he gestured to the box clutched under her left arm "...find some new identity - go on with your life - and figure out for yourself what you want to do with the rest of it."

It had not been lost on her from the beginning of this conversation that the government had been tracking her for some time - or had at least done quite a lot of digging - and would likely continue doing both until they got whatever it was they wanted. They could invalidate her current identity making something as suddenly trivial as a high school diploma into a worthless piece of parchment. Her father killed in prison. Herself living on the streets. Again.

She considered the likely events and her limited options - a box of cash under her left arm and the fingers of her right hand ticking against her thigh - as she just stared back at him for nearly a minute before asking quietly, "And what if Sarah Walker _is_ at that address?"

Graham's disposition lightened almost comically as he took a single step forward and his posture changed with hands turned out in an inviting pose at the question indicating his preferred outcome. "Then she exists only within those walls. Maybe at other times if later situations dictate it. Only when I _say_ she's Sarah Walker. But that same life of adventure awaits. For the most part we'll find plenty of new Jennys and Katies and Rebeccas for her to play. She'll be trained by the best in everything for which she shows any sort of aptitude. And then...well...we'll just see what she becomes."

"I mean, what about Sarah Walker's father?" Her voice had trembled slightly. For all her bluster, he knew he had her now. And letting her come to him was a small but significant way to diffuse some of the animosity of using someone she cared about to manipulate her. But he would worry about that once preparations had been completed and once she chose the easy way or the hard way.

"Well, _Jenny_...she doesn't _have_ a father. With the sorts of adventures Sarah is going to be up to it just wouldn't be safe for him or for anyone else from her old life. But I'll be in a position to help him too - if we have your cooperation - and _your_ father will get the sweetest deal a criminal like him can get. Protection from his enemies. Slate wiped completely clean. New identity, new life. If Sarah Walker devotes herself to honing her craft she may even find herself in a position to help him out if he finds that he can't quite walk the straight and narrow. I wonder if you think he might need that kind of help later on? Even if we give him that clean slate?"

He could see from the look on her face that she knew he would.

"Enjoy your birthday. Enjoy your graduation. You have twelve whole weeks to think it over." Business was concluded and Graham was confident he would have a visitor on the 15th. If not, he would just have her picked up by the men he was leaving behind to observe her - the ones currently planting dozens of burst transmission tracking devices on nearly everything useful she owned.

As he turned to walk away, leaving the girl to contemplate the card with nothing more than the required address embossed on its surface; impaled by the knife embedded in the tree next to her, he couldn't help giving a final reminder.

"June 15th. 9:00 am. If you're there we can help you become the formidable woman I believe you can be. And I'll make sure the hounds don't get your father's scent."

After the scary man had gone, she knelt down and examined the cash that moments ago represented so many possibilities that were now off the table. It might be enough to live on for a few years but a young girl paying cash for anything of significance would draw suspicion. Where would she stay? She had no one and wasn't sure where to find her mother even if she had been prepared to face her.

Her father was in custody and she had the means to keep him safe. Something she had failed to do over the past year or so. She had something to trade - herself. And maybe the offer itself would be all the man - who had failed to give his name - had described. She had already proven to herself that a normal childhood wasn't quite what she had hoped. She had been considering rejoining forces with her father anyway - maybe this was the next step. Her next adventure. And maybe she would be on the right side this time.

Despite the man's seeming indifference over the outcome, with her father in danger and the spotlight of the CIA clearly focused on her, Jenny Burton knew the only real choice she had was how she intended to travel across the country twelve weeks from now to make her appointment on time.

Then she could find out for herself what she could become.

.

* * *

END OF LINE

* * *

.

A/N2: I went brain numb researching San Diego public schools course and graduation requirements - much less what they were sixteen years ago - so anyone whose experiences differ just roll with it. I didn't deliberately do the stereotypical thing by making a female character bad at math and science. Note that she's not exactly _bad_ at anything - just less good than everything else - and mostly because she's just not that interested. I didn't want to make her excel at everything. Although I'm pretty sure she would if she _were_ interested.

As far as that final flashback scene of 'Baby', I'll rarely scrap a canon scene entirely and it _was_ nice of them to invite Tony Todd back for one last hurrah, but it simply has to go for multiple reasons. First, how does Sarah beat Casey to Burbank by a full day if she's bouncing from San Diego to DC back to LA? In this story, she's already there. Second, handlers in general. I declare that Sarah has not had a handler for a long time until the Bryce disappearance when they wanted her watched closely. I always thought the implication was that everyone has a handler at all times. Maybe some do but Graham's Enforcer did NOT have a handler. Finally, the scene makes a ridiculous presumption by assigning Sarah (the BEST there is) to 'handle' a civilian when they haven't even yet ascertained whether he is of any use or danger to them. As a farewell scene for Tony Todd I can forgive all this, I just can't use it.

I realize that some installments are difficult to complete in one sitting with some - especially the 'long takes' - requiring readers to set aside time. Hopefully readers are checking the 'content' notes, planning their reading accordingly and finding it worth their while. Only one prologue chapter left after these, another single chapter 'long take' that contains some reveals I had not originally intended to provide so early and that wraps up this grim prologue. Coming in two weeks...


	4. IV: Interlude - Jokers Wild

...in which the Director of the CIA reflects on the manner in which his deadliest agent eventually embraced her unique capabilities and her instrumental influence on a previously abandoned research project - one that ultimately led to a viable solution for a now-missing experimental government intelligence program...

Canon Reference: sidetrack occurring simultaneously with early events of 'Intersect' (aka the Pilot, episode 1.01) and immediately following Chapter 4 from the previous installment; calls upon various elements of Intersect lore from throughout the series

Contents: One super-sized chapter (Ch 6, nearly 13K words with several 'snack breaks' similar to Ch 1); a few early reveals to wrap up our prologue and move on to Burbank; this one deals with some important character elements from a different perspective and how they are tied to multiple elements of Intersect lore and to the Intersect itself.

A/N: I know you're all looking forward to Sarah's arrival in Burbank but this massive chapter (and the secrets it holds) lies between us and those events. As we approach the canon scenes of the pilot episode, be aware that I just go ahead and replace the unnamed 'National Intelligence Director' played by Wendy Mekkena with Bonita Friedericy's 'General Beckman' of the NSA as though it has always been that way. It's easy for me to forget that it _hasn't_ always been that way until I pop in that first disk...

Soon, I will not be subjecting you all to these 'This is John Galt Speaking'-esque chapters (oh, c'mon. Its not _THAT_ bad), at least not as frequently. I will be shifting to my preferred format of several 3K to 5K chapters presented in these same-sized installments - the prologue just didn't lend itself to that. This one is a lot of exposition and pseudo-science and very introspectively narrative-driven (ZERO dialogue - well, direct dialogue anyway - but you'll see why). It would have taken multiple scenes to do it any other way.

It is crazy convoluted which you should have anticipated and known we were in trouble as soon as you saw the words 'Intersect lore'.

Disclaimers / Easter Eggs: The author has derived no income or other profit from this work. No ownership or claim is asserted or implied to the characters or story of the television show CHUCK or the movie _Tron_ in this or any other part. Additionally, in this part, no ownership or claim is asserted or implied to _Atlas Shrugged_ (above), Aesop's Fable #87 (likely NOT subject to copyright!), Dr. Suess' _The Cat in the Hat_, the word game Mad Libs, _Unforgiven_, or a relatively obscure Marvel comics character (which is simultaneously a callout to the epic fan fic that got me creatively and emotionally invested in this madness...).

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Part IV: Interlude - Jokers Wild

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006: Jokers Wild

Washington, D.C., Office of D/CIA; Wed Sept 19, 2007, 4:40 pm

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After breaking the news about Larkin and giving a few additional instructions to his agent, CIA Director Langston Graham hung up his phone, sat back heavily in his desk chair, closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and blew out a deep breath. He had been up for over 36 hours and assumed he would be up well into the evening again.

He preferred his Langley office but given the cooperative mandate for the Intersect project, he had shifted his habits to this office in Washington and he suspected the inconvenience would continue until this latest situation was resolved. Diane Beckman of the NSA was located here and she had been in charge of the Intersect program since its inception. He had only gotten involved over the last eighteen months and had been more focused on his own efforts prior to that. Given recent breakthroughs he thought it prudent to take a more active role in the project and at least put on a better show of cooperating.

The hour was late enough - barely - that he deemed it respectable to rise and extract a half-empty bottle of Glenlivet 21 from his well-stocked credenza. As he poured two fingers of single malt whiskey he once again congratulated himself on successfully establishing several 'research and support' substations in a few key cities throughout the country several years ago. Since his agents technically weren't supposed to be operating domestically, these substations were ostensibly staffed with technical support and intelligence analysis personnel. If anyone ever noticed that a handful of agents happened to be present on long rotations from time to time that really couldn't be helped.

Unfortunately, of the two agents currently present in Los Angeles, one was not very seasoned and the other was not particularly subtle. Neither agent was his first preference for a mission of this importance and sensitivity and he was glad he hadn't pulled the trigger and just flipped a coin between the two. But the mere existence of the LA substation meant that Agent Walker had a place to go for any equipment, intel or additional support she needed to make contact with the target and complete her mission quickly.

He would reestablish contact with her once she had checked in there. To ensure that she would only deal with support staff and the other two agents would not cross paths with her he quickly sent word to recall them to Washington immediately. He had been sitting on something for a few days in which one of them would be keenly interested. That would leave Walker to operate freely in LA for now and reevaluate based on wherever the investigation led her.

If Agent Walker hadn't unexpectedly surfaced nearby he would have had to choose one of the available agents. But she was still his absolute best and she had the additional advantage of being almost completely unknown to the rest of the intelligence community. A phantom who could remain hidden from his congressional overseers, the NSA and this latest, long-fermenting menace rising from within his own ranks.

He stoppered the bottle, put it back in its place and took the few steps to his office window. He let the old fashioned glass dangle from his fingertips at his side as he gazed across the city scape of the Capital and recalled that first meeting with the young girl who would become Agent Walker.

She hadn't started out with any particular indication that she would or could become what she had. She _shouldn't_ have become what she had. He had never imagined that the spindly, terrified girl he confronted in a wooded area near her home in San Diego nearly a decade ago would become his most valued weapon in his rapid ascension through the ranks of The Agency.

She was brilliant. Something she kept hidden and only he seemed to realize or fully appreciate. Never revealing her true capabilities. Always holding something in reserve. But her intellect was why he had first targeted her as a potential intelligence asset and research subject over fifteen years ago - much longer than she herself knew.

Her language skills were phenomenal - an 'intuitive hyper polyglot' as his scientists had later described her - and that was both a specific skill he coveted for his project and a cognitive process heavily related to the other areas of their research that were lagging the most. Her father's erratic travel patterns had made her difficult to follow and the unconventional father-daughter con team wasn't exactly the top priority of the CIA but he flagged them nonetheless.

Everywhere the father and daughter were detected his agents later interviewed the people with whom she had interacted and found that over time she had expanded her repertoire impressively: speaking Spanish in Nogales in '92, Canadian French in Quebec in '93, learning nuances of Russian from a kindly old man she had befriended in Chicago in '94 and picking up fragments of other languages in their other travels.

The project had not been ready for her then and he worried he had lost track of her completely in late 1996. But by the time they caught up with her in San Diego in 1998, Graham's pet project's 'Template' program was still struggling with technical obstacles and they were beginning parallel work on the more ambitious and more problematic neural mapping additions.

The neural mapping efforts they - correctly, as it turned out - believed would ultimately benefit from understanding her uncommon linguistic ability. The efforts that _would_ have allowed temporary transference of skills and abilities to agents for use on specific missions in addition to possibly correcting some of the flaws in the Template program that had led to even Graham suspending that program. The efforts that _had_ been so close to a serious breakthrough after over six years of development until the events of last night had destroyed their only working model and most of their research.

Graham lamented that all his research had recently been so heavily concentrated at the Intersect facility. It was foolish but he had only intended to briefly move it all to one place while they merged it with the Intersect program. Just as his project had seemed to crack the code to making the Intersect functional, the Intersect encoding breakthroughs had given his research team strong hopes of advancing his project to its final stage. He had hoped it would be the final step. Instead Larkin had blown everything to hell.

He took a burning sip of scotch and reflected on the project he had quietly been building for years.

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The Template program was built upon the failures of three unidentified scientists in the mid '80s; a learning machine concept referred to as The Cipher.

All digital records of the participation, involvement, identity and whereabouts of any scientists or research subjects had been expunged with no clear indication of why or by whom and the physical records were so heavily redacted as to be useless. Upon attempting to dig deeper Graham had been reprimanded and told that all personnel and testing information was Code: Black. One of many projects that were only known to exist due to directives explicitly stating that they did _not_ exist.

Executive seal prevented his further inquiry or even that of the Director of the CIA. But the Director at the time was as curious as Graham at the possibilities and did allow him to utilize the few surviving prototype hardware components - although a key element apparently used as a system programming matrix would have to be reverse engineered - and some surviving notes kept by a technician regarding the technical aspects of the program.

As an Assistant Director - a position achieved after a career as a conniving and selectively brutal field agent and later successes leading similarly ruthless teams in Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East - Graham had built up a lot of political currency within The Agency. He lobbied for and received sponsorship for a program to recreate and build upon the visual encoding technology that seemed to have been originally created to help facilitate rapid learning of mission critical information.

It was a dual purpose research project. Over his career, Graham had encountered plenty of highly proficient trainees and had also encountered plenty of candidates who would do whatever it took to get the job done. But these were rarely the same people. He had a vision of streamlining the agent recruitment process in one of two ways:

The technology could potentially be used to either make highly trained individuals more receptive to his vision - a select group of highly trained, highly proficient intelligence operatives who who could subtly be made more receptive to doing the things no one wanted to talk about, the _way_ he wanted them done. This was the less desirable option because it still required a huge investment in training time that was only justifiable if results were guaranteed.

Or it could be used to grant those already more willing to do the dirty work the unparalleled ability to do so. Accelerate and broaden their training and push them beyond their natural limitations.

To either make the capable more willing or to make the willing more capable.

The learning machine concept of the original Cipher could conceivably be used to solve either problem.

The 'Cipher A', behavioral modification, or 'Template', program leveraged what they believed to be an untested aspect of the original learning program. An aspect that theoretically made it possible to temporarily overwrite a subject with a specific persona and some small but key fabricated memories to create authenticity. The trick was doing so with some degree of 'transparency' so that the agent you have spent so much time, effort and money training was not completely lost. If successful, agents would be able to commit entirely to their covers while still maintaining some underlying ability to control their actions and utilize their considerable training.

They would be less likely to break cover under duress or even torture. Less likely to make a catastrophic mistake. And, with a few modifications Graham had incorporated, less likely to refuse to follow questionable orders. Graham's preferred tactics - and other tactics he was at least willing to entertain - definitely included options that most considered extreme or immoral, if not outright illegal. He hadn't ascended to his current position by leaving any options on the table.

The 'Cipher B', neural mapping and upload, or 'Skills', program was even further behind than its foundering sister program. The complexity involved in transferring not just information, but also the associated neurological control of a subject's body and the necessary instant replication of 'muscle memory' seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. They could not yet understand how to significantly compress the gradual, natural process of _learning_ a physical skill. Or compress the massive amount of data that would be required into digestible packets.

It wasn't as subtle as the Template program. There was some remedial work on 'layering' repetitive downloads - alternating incrementally more intense 10 to 25 minute information downloads with physical repetition of the downloaded information. But those efforts still seemed to rely upon the old adage describing the best way to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

So the project's initial efforts concentrated more on what was deemed the more achievable Template program - manipulating an already proficient, highly-trained individual into doing things they would ordinarily hesitate or even outright refuse to do. Removing all hesitation. Creating spies with what Graham deemed the perfect mindset.

The overall project was code named 'Omaha' and after many promises and failures to deliver on them it was considered a disaster. So much so that almost everyone who was interested in it had distanced themselves from it. The fact that it couldn't even be evaluated without human testing was the primary reason. Of the original three volunteer research subjects, two were catatonic and the third completely and violently insane. All three were officially listed as killed in action and hidden away in a secure institution.

Involvement by many long-since departed officials was quietly covered up but the Director of the CIA at the time still appreciated the possibilities and - like Graham - focused on the ends over the means. Although he offered no public shows of support the project was never fully discontinued. Research and development simply became far more subtle.

Lack of full funding - relying on pilfering from operational budgets - made for slow going. The remaining core team of scientists had attempted to replicate some of the missing and undocumented componentry of the original Cipher but the transparency issue was still a huge problem. When people were crammed into ill-fitting personas they could conceivably be tightly controlled but were only good for a few missions. Their minds tended to simply break when attempting to turn them into someone too different than their true selves.

Few missions were so significant that they justified wasting heavily trained resources in such a way. So the programming would have to be used sparingly or there was a risk of burning out the agent's mind with too many personas or personas their subconscious fought against too intensely. An army of highly trained but catatonic and bedridden agents would be nearly as useless as an army of highly trained agents with tendencies to object to his orders.

Successes were limited to downloading basic, static information with no better reliability than putting the same information on a piece of paper and letting the subject study it.

A technological marvel but a practical failure.

They could not reliably get anyone to deliberately do anything they wouldn't normally at least entertain doing - not without forcing the subject's personality to yield to the imposed one entirely. The program scientists feared that this specific use of the old technology would be unpredictable, uncontrollable and potentially irreversible. They could download details of cover identities but they were still just a suit the agent can take off, not the influential control they were hoping for.

The best use was tapping into the darkest parts of an agent's psyche. The things even they didn't want to acknowledge we're a part of them. The subject still needed to _accept_ the program - embrace the things they didn't want to admit they were capable of doing.

They still did not have the right understanding of the mental process required to get people to embrace different 'imposed' personas of their darker selves - to pretend to be someone else to the point that they _become_ them and still manage to remain in control - much less allow more subtle guidance of their actions.

And then a research subject raised from her youth to do exactly that - become someone else - fell unexpectedly into their laps.

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It had not been Graham's initial intention to recruit Jenny Burton - or whatever she chose to call herself - as an agent. His initial impressions upon actually meeting the girl made him reconsider it as a possibility. Her youth would have prevented him from recruiting her as any type of conventional agent so this project was the perfect place to hide her away from the world while he assessed her full potential.

When she did arrive at the specified time and place he greeted her warmly. Following his instructions to introduce herself at the desk as Sarah Walker had been the first tiny step in molding her. He just had no idea at the time how instrumental she would be in developing the process that would be used to mold her further.

He had made a point of greeting her personally, formally introducing himself and apologizing for being so heavy handed upon their first meeting. He assured her that her father was being relocated to the east coast and assuming a new identity, as agreed upon. That he had kept his end of their bargain. A three-minute phone call under the pretense of the U.S. Marshalls' WITSEC program had sealed the deal.

He did not go into details about the patriarch of the Leonov crime organization being found dead in his prison's showers and his successor agreeing to remove the bounty on Jack Burton's head under threat of a similar fate. These tactics were discussions for another time. He instead talked up the exciting caricature of life as a government agent. Every word was true in one way or another but painted a deliberately incomplete picture.

She was almost immediately shipped off to Boston to begin her language studies and rudimentary but intense physical training - emphasizing promises of a life of purpose and adventure with no particularly high expectations. During that training, his research scientists began evaluating her neural activity as it related to language learning and the fortunes of the project changed dramatically.

Unlike downloading basic static information, speaking a language with the level of effectiveness he demanded was far more than just memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules. It is a physical _and_ mental skill. They originally hoped that studying her learning process would drive some progress toward rapid learning of not just language but other skills as well. They hadn't expected her to be the goose that continued to lay golden eggs.

Two of the top researchers were involved in both the Template program and the neural mapping aspects - Cipher A and B - or 'Thing One' and 'Thing Two' as they often referred to the two different flavors of Cipher technology. Due to the reduction in resources they both happened to be present when a young woman known only by a project reference code had reported for screening. She was visibly nervous and they got her talking to try to ease her nerves over the course of several hours of testing.

They had been directed to focus on language learning but in the course of discussion quickly discovered that she had learned those languages to help her father on 'jobs'. The young woman wasn't entirely forthcoming when they asked about the nature of those jobs but they pretended to be lesser ranking technicians and asked probing questions like if she ever had to pretend to be someone else - like an agent would be expected to do, of course.

Their interest was piqued and, over the course of hours of deliberately and unnecessarily slow calibrations and the time-consuming tests themselves, some limited conversation eventually began to reluctantly flow. Eventually they both got the vaguely described but distinct impression that this young woman was naturally adept at convincing herself and everyone around her that she was someone else. They later persuaded Graham that she could be an ideal test subject for the stalled Template program in addition to using her language proficiency to kick start the neural mapping aspects of the Skills project.

After further discussion with Graham revealed or confirmed some elements of her background, they became even more convinced and argued that her time spent as a con artist while so very young, minimal interaction with peers and her underdeveloped sense of social norms made her the closest thing they would ever find to a blank slate.

Graham couldn't repress his smile - both at the time and upon reflecting upon the memory - and both then and now silently thanked the girl's father for spending nearly the previous decade training the perfect research subject for them.

She couldn't have been better suited if her father had handed her over as a baby.

Additional neurological tests while role playing under the guise of agent training revealed compartmentalized cortical activity that led them to change their approach from wholesale identities and focus on manipulating the function of the prefrontal cortex; just enough to create a sort of void in the subject's neural center that established their personality. A void that could be filled via visually encoded suggestions tailored to the subject. Suggestions delivering the complementary personality traits of a specifically formatted cover identity and even a few vague snippets of fabricated memories of which the subject's own mind attempted to create a corresponding mental image and which reinforced the desired behaviors.

The revised, less-intense testing on dozens of recruits had shown no results whatsoever and Graham had begun to think that the screening tests were simply too mild. He had suggested intensified testing which he was assured would short circuit the test subjects in such a way as to both invalidate the tests and make the subjects even less likely to adhere to future programming. His researchers emphasized that this program was unlike the unrelated accelerated physical enhancement program that seemed to benefit from pushing the envelope in most cases. The approach in this case had to be subtle. So subtle as to be undetectable.

They didn't want to push too hard, too fast but Jenny Burton didn't seem to suffer from he same strain of repetitive suggestions as other test subjects. The programming they devised after her initial scans worked so much like her natural thought process that they were quickly able to iterate their approach based on her reactions to develop a viable protocol. Within the Template program she was known simply as 'Template 34' and all subsequent research was based on her ability to embed herself in the role of an assumed identity.

First they trained the subject's brain to translate the encoding - a high res version of a manufacturing QR code - by bombarding the visual cortex with QR fragments and descriptive key words and images in a series of seemingly random combinations. This was done embedded in mundane training videos or in a blur of nothing but such images portrayed while under mild sedation as some sort of optical response test. Either way, the subject had no indication or awareness that they were developing an ability to process any future codes.

Then they worked on embedding the codes in other images. They could replace the obvious code matrix with seemingly innocuous photographs with hidden codes that the mind could still process. They could then associate that information with narrative profiles that reinforced the traits of the cover identity under the desired cover name. Adding seemingly random sets of single nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs to the training images allowed the creation of code phrases only Graham knew linked to a certain persona's encoding in a Machiavellian game of Mad Libs. As long as the briefing photos were presented in the proper order the personality of the agent would be subtly molded with no indication of what had been done.

It was more crude and cumbersome than they had envisioned but it worked. In addition to breakthroughs in language learning, her natural ability to assume a cover both made her better able to absorb their first clumsy attempts at the Template process used to reinforce her various training identities and provided the feedback necessary to advance their research and development into something more broadly usable. And they were able to turn a few otherwise mild-mannered but highly capable agents into deadly weapons.

The result was a serviceable ability to successfully impose 'personas' upon some agents. Not full ones - those fatal flaws still existed - but shells of identities. Subtle nudges designed to improve consistency, adherence to covers and dedication to mission objectives. Suggestions that worked best when tailored to the individual's capability and willingness to perform the actions expected of the cover identity.

To the things they were - at least on some level - willing to do.

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The same mental process that made her so proficient at language learning became evident in other ways when her latent athletic ability was awakened during her fundamental agent training. They realized that her ability to quickly mimic, then thoroughly learn and master various fighting styles was another mental process they could study, replicate and optimize and they chose to invest three years on gathering bio-neural data on every fighting style under the sun. Both her process for learning them and her practice of their mastered forms.

The technology housed in what appeared to be a vacant store rivaled the most advanced projects at DARPA. The scanning equipment alone originally took up the space of two large bookcases, the agent's neural learning process was evaluated with hidden cortical scanners and ocular readers in the ceiling disguised as surveillance cameras. Devices on par with a surveillance satellite's magnification and tracking capabilities just on a physically smaller scale.

The scanning technology was eventually compressed and simplified to the size of a double-lens helmet cam or goggles, coupled with neural signal readers hidden throughout catsuit-style mission gear to read neuromuscular responses. The project engineers seemed bewildered when Graham commented on the form-fitting garb and any fantasy fulfillment getting in the way of research progress but they cited only the need for maximum conductivity. This gear was used on a variety of training missions to process learning and mastery of other field skills.

Research successes were built upon her individual successes. All this occurred while she was emerging as one of the most proficient martial artists, incursion specialists and strategists her instructors had ever seen. The data they had banked would hopefully one day be used to create additional 'super-spies' but _her_ capabilities were not uploaded in any way.

Her skills were hard earned through a combination of natural talent and sheer will. This original super agent had achieved that status entirely by her own efforts. Her amazing skill set was all her. As the only research subject whose skill set had not benefitted at all from the shortcuts of minor downloads - the one who came first - she had been designated in all program testing and documentation on this side of the project as simply 'Subject Zero'.

Graham was as impressed as her instructors at her ability to master multiple fighting styles and other valuable skills. And - not satisfied with one agent of such prodigious skill - he was ecstatic at the idea of one day being able to program agents with that same proficiency. To make copies of her with a fraction of the time and effort that would otherwise be required and beyond what would otherwise be a particular agent's expected limitations.

Because they had not initially realized she would be their ideal template, the opportunity to map her learning of the most basic elements had been lost. These gaps were relatively easy to fill when they ran a few recruits with less potential and even less natural ability through the same facility.

Even Larkin, who had shown real potential, was only able to achieve his level of martial arts proficiency through the few limited tests of these downloads and subsequent heavy reinforcement in the dojo. He was one of a handful of agents who benefitted from the template data pulled from scans of Subject Zero and who were more recently considered viable candidates to host the Intersect. Those who did so successfully would be further considered for testing of future incarnations of the Cipher.

His proficiency in some styles nearly equalled hers and he mirrored her style - one that suited his relatively small stature similar to how it minimized her strength disadvantage against most opponents. But it took forever. Nearly as long as the data collection itself and only covered a few of the styles mastered by Subject Zero.

Graham realized it was extremely unlikely he would ever find another person who could combine so many skills at such high levels of proficiency without the assistance of a successful Cipher B solution.

But Subject Zero had given them the makings of the skills template they planned to use to create the ready-made agents Graham desired. The ability to actually upload those skills into an agent candidate would take additional years of research but they were nearly half-way there and the once impossible now seemed at least feasible.

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She had initially embraced her training out of fear of reprisals but, still young, impressionable and hopeful despite her ingrained suspicious nature and with constant encouragement from Graham, his prized agent trainee found that she simply enjoyed being so good at so many impressive things and it fed her childhood desire for adventure. But later, even with the vast skill set she had mastered, Graham had initially struggled to find a _use_ for her. He had built the most advanced, high-performance racing machine in the world with a driver who backed away from the red-line in critical situations.

Late in her experimental training, an agent had been sent to befriend and assess her psychologically as well as encourage behaviors intended to reduce any 'social awkwardness' from her unconventional childhood. The observations were not entirely encouraging. Her morality profile was a mixed bag compared to his expectations based on her upbringing. She wasn't completely amoral or as hedonistic as he had hoped despite some intemperate tendencies. She was an adrenaline junkie and risk-taker but was somewhat sensitive to the effects of her actions on others.

His early assessment of her moral flexibility turned out to be entirely dependent on the situation. He already suspected she would do nearly anything for her own survival or for someone she cared about - based on their very first interaction - but the less personally compelling the reason the more likely she was to choose right over wrong.

Like any prospective agent, he didn't want _her_ making those assessments.

Most of her trial missions were disastrous. At least the ones involving anything beyond what he considered nothing more than petty crime. The things he could and often did farm out to actual criminals. She barely passed some of her field assessments - including an archaic red test not usually assigned to conventional recruits but a staple of this and other experimental programs that he found useful for establishing and testing control - seemingly out of reflex more than by design.

Based on the confiscated security footage, he was nearly certain she had intended to abort the test and let the assassination target he had chosen for her escape before suddenly going for the kill. In subsequent missions she tried to detain people she was ordered to eliminate more often than not. But even with her contributions to the research program he had invested three years in her, had increased his expectations and now he wanted his vision of a surgical, ruthless assassin not a con woman with a stun gun or a can of mace.

She had insisted on being considered for a paramilitary rotation in SAD like most of her male peers. It was atypical of a female agent and he had been certain she would fail even though her training to date had allowed her to leap frog other candidates and join a team after only a few additional trainings. Instead it seemed the black and white, kill or be killed nature of combat operations brought out the best in her and reinforced his assessment of her survival instincts.

Her unit loved her but he didn't want people asking questions about her true background if she were left there. He didn't bother contemplating what it meant that life in a war zone was the least psychologically stressful activity he was imposing on her when he chose another type of mission for evaluating her potential and the potential uses of the Cipher program.

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All agents knew the risks of seduction missions which was why so many precautions were usually taken when his more valuable agents were involved. Graham didn't normally push those agents into these more risky, less-controlled situations. He had been known to send local prostitutes in with minimal information and simple instructions in order to preserve his more valuable chess pieces.

He had also been experimenting with a few lesser-trained women he had 'rescued' from desperate situations - women he intended more as infiltrators than legitimate agents. They required some training but didn't represent nearly as much of an investment as an agent. Their uses were few and they were easily replaced.

The slim risk of a female agent trained as an assassin being first, caught in a situation so desperate as to decide maintaining cover was her only chance for survival and second, blaming him personally and seeking retribution was a situation he would prefer to avoid. Setting such a thing as an _expectation_ for such an agent was also likely hazardous to ones health. Or job security. Defection or some other type of retaliation became much more likely if the survival options of a seduction mission devolved to the repulsive extreme and he didn't want his most effective weapons later used against him.

How freely these tactics were used came and went in cycles over the years but he knew from associates in other agencies that something similar was attempted a few years prior with various enticements of desperate women vulnerable to manipulation with mixed success. A few candidates he had run across were railroaded into such objectionable roles and they found their own ways of coping with those types of assignments. Given her failures to fully execute her orders on previous elimination missions, he was curious whether implanted cover personas could improve upon those results despite Walker's irrational fear of such situations.

She had participated as part of support teams on missions that had gone horribly wrong and witnessing what had happened to other female agents in similar situations didn't bode well for this next test. But despite her training, as long as she refused to kill in most situations - as long as she didn't represent much of a threat to anyone - as long as she remained somewhat toothless - Graham decided to use her to test the limits of the Cipher's Template personas.

A few textbook seductions with adequate support had been relatively uneventful. But one with an foolishly, yet expectedly, overly-aggressive mark in Constanta in December of 2001 had an unforeseen outcome. Tactical support options were limited enough due to a small but well-trained armed security presence. Graham had taken the extra step of casually ordering the support team to stand down - against their objections - even as she increasingly awkwardly worked the abort code word into conversation three times in under two minutes. He had a different outcome in mind for this one.

The outcome of the mission itself was of minimal importance to him. He would simply let the mark push her into the unplanned alternative inherent in any of these types of missions to see how she would choose to proceed. Would she panic in any way? Try to talk her way out? Or join the ranks of his other infiltrators by committing to the cover and allowing her target to simply behave the way she had so recently enthusiastically encouraged? He simply waited to see how effectively the behavioral template would force her to maintain her submissive cover identity.

It had the unexpected result of causing her to buck the program completely.

It would have been yet another failure if not for her achieving all of her mission objectives despite rejecting the option she had been trained to endure if necessary; the option that all of his female full-fledged agents found repulsive. She instead opted to unleash her extensive talents in multiple deadly arts mastered over the course of three years of training and these past few months of service in a glorious display of violence.

She was aware and lucid enough to then systematically search the house, crack the safe she had only planned to locate and calmly interrogate the two survivors before coldly finishing them off. After dispatching the last remaining guard, she gave her would-be rapist the option of a quick end or being abandoned there - unmoving with his broken spine lying among the corpses of his security detail - in exchange for information.

She hadn't consciously intended to injure him quite so severely but a vicious elbow strike to his back had carried every bit of her anger, fear and subconscious application of her knowledge of the weak points of the human body with it. Having outed herself as the opposite of a helpless victim she had freely admitted to the obvious implication that she was a government agent of some kind. He would need to be detained or silenced.

There was too much venom in it to consider it a mercy killing but she wouldn't have wanted to be left like that - at least not if she expected to never see daylight again. So, once he had told her everything she needed to know about his illegal operations and key contacts, she retrieved a tactical knife from one of his downed men and kept her promise.

The unutilized support team members thought they had been reduced to transport for the unknown agent. They were already shedding and packing up their gear into their two vehicles when she exited the garage in her own transportation. And they griped and grumbled and called foul names after her when the Dutch orange Spyker C8 that she had just orphaned slowed down as it passed - just long enough for her to roll down the heavily tinted window and deliver a one-finger salute.

They had been instructed to assist the cleaner team with removing all evidence of her presence and grumbled some more about being assigned to help dispose of the bodies. Their complaints turned to silence when they saw the carnage one unassisted and unarmed woman had left behind.

It was two-hours from Constanta to the debrief site in Bucharest and she barely registered that she had made the drive. She had been sitting on the floor of the briefing room, barefoot, in a gold sequined gown splashed with blood; her ruined shoes abandoned in a snow-filled roadside ditch along with the contents of her stomach after a few miles. The same darkening crimson stain was in her hair and partly covering her face as she stared into space until Graham arrived.

The look in her eyes may have been frightening but her results and brutal efficiency was more than he could have hoped for. It was a thing of beauty and made Graham smile again as he sipped his whiskey and recalled how everything had turned out.

His reaction at the time was not as optimistic although he now hoped to achieve similar results with future agents of the project. Graham had humored her with empty apologies for the mission outcome - blaming a comms malfunction for the support team's failure to intercede - and praised her application of her training while she started to shake as she came down from the adrenaline high.

As she emerged from a near fugue state and began to recall her actions she barely had enough self control remaining to prevent herself from coming completely unhinged or to conceal the struggle of it from Graham.

.

* * *

.

She _was_ capable of it. She was the immensely powerful weapon he had envisioned the project one day producing but this particular weapon was completely uncontrollable. Her one constant motivator appeared to be self-preservation but it was unclear how or if they could hope to reliably replicate fear of death as a trigger. He had found her breaking point but it was not a practical solution. These sorts of breakdowns in high-stress situations coupled with significant training delays were why the Template program was the less ideal solution by far.

Graham felt he had exhausted the possibilities. As far as he was concerned, she was simply weak. A small time crook raised by a small time crook, neither of whom could play with the big boys. The programming wouldn't hold and attempting to intensify the personas - whether assassin or seductress - and force her into the desired actions was almost certain to fail. Results may not be as favorable next time. She would get herself killed and waste all of her potential, or worse, reveal her affiliations.

Over the next few months multiple missions were undertaken during lulls in her SAD service. Additional attempts at lesser, relatively risk-free seductions had again devolved into panicked violence - the opposite of what Graham wanted and earning her an unflattering nickname that she defiantly adopted briefly as a code name for such missions. One specific joint operation with another agency that would have been at least somewhat traumatizing to anyone had seriously rattled her and somehow caused her cold and vicious persona to briefly reemerge. Yet she had attempted to detain targets of two elimination missions, successfully doing so once and forced to kill rather than doing so cleanly in the first place in the other.

She had shown she would kill when necessary in combat and for self-preservation but still hadn't embraced her abilities. She was too unpredictable, too uncontrollable and was always a bad psychological fit for the type of agent he wanted. And she was never intended as anything more than a research subject anyway.

Given all the investment in training, it had been worth a try. He had gotten more than he expected out of her in terms of advancing Cipher research. The small but important breakthroughs may have paved the way for downloadable skills in a few years. But as an agent, he was ready to chalk her up as a lost cause. He could just have her disposed of - put down like a plow horse that had outlived its usefulness. He could find some sort of support role or possibly set her up with a new identity in exchange for her silence and cut her loose entirely. After all, he did owe most of the project successes to her.

He had settled on washing his hands of her entirely. He had cut open the golden goose only to find there was nothing left to extract from her. Whether he would get rid of her by elimination or with a new identity he was still undecided. Instead it seemed the goose had one final golden egg to offer. The most valuable yet. The one that made his vision of her possible. She preempted his decision by making her proposition and sealed her fate.

It seemed she had been stewing over the seduction mission in Romania that had resulted in nothing less than a massacre and the few others where she had witnessed other agency resources pushed too far. She recognized the possibility of one day encountering a situation she couldn't tear and claw her way out of and considered her options. She decided she wanted more than anything to avoid the possibility of having to maintain her cover to an unacceptable degree in order to survive if she encountered an even more hopeless situation.

She only asked that he exhaust all other possibilities before giving her such assignments in the future and to allow her unlimited license to do it 'her way' if she must. And there had to be dozens of other types of missions for which she was better suited. Theoretical exercises aside, she would do anything he needed. Just not that.

He was initially dismissive of the idea, mostly because he simply didn't want an agent to dictate the terms of her service. Avoiding certain types of missions entirely would be a shame considering the stunning beauty they had uncovered when the awkward young girl had joined their ranks. But he didn't correct her mistaken assumption that he would casually put his most valuable resources in such unpredictable situations. He had other agents and lesser resources who could fill those roles but she didn't need to know that. What she was offering was something much more valuable to him.

And she had agreed that a seduction _approach_ was still on the table for initial infiltration just that he shouldn't expect any survivors to question if she was forced to do anything more than talk or fake her way out. He also couldn't conceive such a mission breaking down so completely as his deliberate manipulation of the one that had spurred this unsolicited offer. And he was perfectly satisfied with 'her way'.

So instead of cutting her loose, as intended, Graham noncommittally said he would take it under advisement. He mentioned it casually in a weekly briefing with the project scientists and was met with surprisingly thoughtful silence. Their silence and the looks exchanged tipped him off that he may have stumbled on to something. A solution to the problem of candidates rejecting the programming. And all it required was for him to graciously accept her unsolicited proposal. One tiny detail made all the difference.

She chose.

And the best part was it was entirely her idea. The choice she had made - to do one thing she despised over another thing she despised - gave the program something to latch onto. An anchor point in her psyche that she herself had created. All they had to do then was exploit it to its fullest. As long as she never knew that it was a choice she had been driven to maybe she would be able to do what she herself had suggested.

They were not sure it would work. It was a shitty, somewhat forced choice to be sure. Really no more a choice than any other prior action that had delivered her into his group of elite agents. But the next mission - with a specifically engineered cover persona and an obviously reprehensible target (at least based on the intel she was given) - went off without a hitch. And the next. And the next. She started emulating the briefing process in her own mind - to steel herself for what was to come, compartmentalize to a ridiculous degree and embrace her covers - like she was taught by her father. Her father deserved as much credit for her rebirth as anyone.

She gradually became someone else entirely. Begrudgingly acting under the duress of circumstances led to lesser evils becoming more reasonable and means justifying ends. She became as coldly calculating as any of his most vicious operatives - as deadly as any of his most capable - and his now-notorious Wild Card Enforcer was born.

A vengeful demon that grew in intensity as it fed on its loathing for its own actions. The futility of attempting to escape a downward spiral of countless irredeemable choices had erased the woman she once might have been entirely. She made the fatal error of assuming those choices were her own - a false realization that resigned her to her fate and tore down any remaining resistance to fulfilling what she had been told was her duty. Eventually she didn't even need the coded personas.

From there, the project was able to salvage nearly half the original candidates by creating completely artificial, seemingly-favorable scenarios and choices for their agents. Deliberately staging the same type of accidental contrivance that had been so successful for forcibly evolving Walker and opened her up to the influence of the Cipher's programming. They weren't as versatile as he may have liked but there were enough megalomaniacs and those with heroic delusions to make it work.

These remaining agents were highly effective even if not quite as proficient as what he had envisioned. They weren't _her_. They were making progress but still struggling with how to encode physical skills as successfully as Cipher A had encoded cover personalities. He would bide his time until Cipher B was operational and he could make the already more willing candidates even more capable than this crop of operatives.

Except maybe for Walker. She was a class unto herself.

His favorite attack dog.

Not quite trained to kill from a pup but neither are actual attack dogs. He got her as young as he likely could, had her trained in the basics and then in the deadly arts and lucked into a situation that triggered the best in her. Meaning the worst.

Walker embraced her new role and evolved from acting out of a fear of death or repercussions to operating with a fear of nothing. She eventually reached a point where she took pride in simply being the best in the world at something and the programming was no longer the issue but rather her self-imposed isolation.

She had shown signs of being overcome by remorse at times - dwelling on her actions - and he wanted to keep her operating well for as long as possible. Keep his beautiful enforcer ready for use. So he limited her downtime and began to force her to participate in team operations where she would have to at least interact with others. She started with scouting operations for the Secret Service in locations where Graham had other interests. These were alternated with sensitive solo missions, the details of which he needed to be kept strictly between her and him.

He tried adding a few missions with two and three man teams from his best conventional agents from his own ranks. These achieved a high degree of success but the other agents, not previously knowing each other at all, assumed she was simply bait. Their successes were usually due to the fact that she often ended up as the hammer. These were explained away as her - under whatever cover she had adopted - operating well over her head.

He later assembled a team of three other proficient female agents from various agencies with similar experiences of being minimized by their male peers within their own agencies. This group included one from the DEA she had worked with previously who had refused to quit. He had hoped seeing her old colleague back in action would help assuage her fears. She seemed to stabilize for a while until a still unresolved betrayal fractured the team.

Then he assigned her and Larkin as partners.

Male agents accepted the programming much more easily, often embracing the desired behaviors out of delusions of the stereotypes they grew up with and Larkin was no different. Men were just easier to placate or manipulate and found far less objectionable about their required roles. Any motivation would do. Ambition, revenge, a need for approval, occasionally blackmail if you weren't worried about the beast turning on its handler - negative emotions were better for some reason, more visceral, more difficult to battle with reason.

But Walker remained aloof and isolated despite Larkin's advances. That was when he conceived of Bryce and Sarah Anderson. They were a good match. They leveled each other out and he wanted both to perform at their best. He had paired them up for several missions and assumed that nature would take its course and cement the partnership.

He was willing to risk one more manipulation if it meant having such an effective two-agent team with a believable cover at his disposal. If it kept her even a little bit distracted from the harsh realities of her profession, so much the better. Walker had been careful to maintain her professionalism among her peers and maybe a little nudge by just once more using a specifically configured cover of 'the Andersons' was a little presumptuous. But he rationalized that it really hadn't taken much of a push.

.

* * *

.

Graham stepped back to his desk and looked at the strange device Larkin had in his possession last night. The wrist computer was very similar in design to Larkin'a laptop - the one they had confiscated from Walker - and Larkin had apparently put too much faith in its durability and the reliability of its self-destruct mechanism. It had been damaged during Larkin's escape, seemingly preventing the destruction protocols from fully functioning as intended.

NSA analysts had spent the remainder of last night and most of the morning analyzing the device, sidestepping three boobytraps - non-lethal ones that had been designed as failsafes to destroy components of the device if tampered with - and were fortunate to finally narrow the destination to Los Angeles less than an hour before he had reestablished contact with Agent Walker.

They were as surprised that a direct message had been sent as they were that the device had been capable of compressing and sending the Intersect files. Beckman had exercised her authority over the program and ordered her own personal fixer to prep, depart tonight and organize his team on site tomorrow.

Graham was still hopeful that they had enough time to get ahead of this situation and wouldn't volunteer his suspicions about the recipient until the NSA found something more difinitive on their own. He was fairly certain to whom the message had been sent and would begin with him. NSA would just have to catch up.

Larkin had been a pain in his ass since he became an agent - his _corpse_ had even been mislaid sometime after he was officially declared dead - but he had also been extremely effective over the past four years. Larkin's notion of what it was to be a spy was largely influenced by adolescent movie viewing and Graham chose to encourage that notion. It gave the program something to latch onto. But he was nearly as proficient as Walker in some areas and Graham had opted to tolerate the newly intensified arrogance if Larkin continued to perform as well in the field as he had early on.

He had also caused a lot of trouble with Graham's imbedded recruiting efforts at Stanford when he had attempted to get one of his frat buddies recruited by falsifying several records and test results. He had claimed that his friend was a genius with electronics and there wasn't a system in existence that he couldn't hack.

He had later apologized for trying to deceive Graham, said he had oversold his friend's capabilities and admitted that his friend had been stealing test answers, even selling them to other students. Larkin himself had turned his friend in to school officials when he had discovered evidence of this.

Due to his reputation and obvious intellectual capacity to achieve the grades reflected in his record, the University had been prepared to reprimand him, strip him of his scholarship, require him to fulfill community service obligations and possibly repeat - or at least make him test out of - several classes with even the appearance of grades that were potentially undeserved.

In his anger at the whole situation, Graham had privately accused Larkin's friend of hacking government databases - one of the skills that Larkin had been so complimentary of - and demanded his expulsion. It was admittedly mostly to punish Larkin by hurting someone Graham had thought was close to him.

Having lost his scholarship his friend would have had a hard time paying for any additional tuition or living expenses right away. It should have just been a major inconvenience. Graham was surprised he hadn't managed to sort it out and finish his education in the time since. Clearly he was nothing like what Larkin had described and Larkin's indifference to the whole affair had made it a pointless gesture.

More recently, work on the improved Cipher had continued but the emphasis had turned to the intelligence processing failings of 9/11. The Intersect was a computerized intelligence comparison tool but the pattern recognition program was highly unreliable, spitting out both false negative and false positive results. What they really needed was a far more advanced comparison algorithm or a comparison engine that could make the intuitive leaps that the current Intersect processing core could not.

Never one to pass up an opportunity, Graham saw his chance to seize even more control of the supposedly cooperative dual-agency program. He offered up a potential solution from the project he had claimed was mothballed years ago claiming only a minimal maintenance level of activity during those years. The Intersect-proper utilized a very similar image-based ocular encoding but it had been intended only for analysts and programmers to check their inputs. The primary driver of the Intersect was machine code indexes but both the images and codes co-existed within the Intersect with layers upon layers of both.

It was the means developed for Project Omaha's two programs for a human being to download the visual encoding that was merged with the massive intelligence database. It was a desperation play once the automated comparison system encountered so many problems. It was a lucky breakthrough because one of the key scientists involved - one who was so classified that he was contributing remotely - had disappeared shortly after Graham had introduced his solution. They had to rely on the head scientist on site and the many private contractors from one of the top tech firms far more heavily after that.

Opting to downplay his still active pet project, all involved agreed to adopt the name of the more obvious technological components of the upload room. The room where the coding applied to all inputs was individually checked by analysts and programmers on hundreds of screens with specialized glasses preventing the processing of the subliminal coding. The combined entity became known simply as 'The Intersect'.

The contributions of Project Omaha would only be visible to a select few. Those possessing the rare human mind required to digest the images and make it work. There had been some preliminary discussion - assuming successful testing - that work could be done to further compress the data and broaden the candidate pool.

More importantly to Graham, the density of even the Intersect's _current_ image encoding system might be what they needed to make the Cipher B Skills program work properly. It would result in a somewhat reduced candidate pool - at least until they could produce a more efficient encoding scheme that didn't require such an extremely high subliminal image recognition rate - but transferring image data a thousand times more dense than what they had tried before might do the trick. They had just started investigating the idea for the Cipher 2.0 when Larkin blew up the facility.

And now it has been sent to the same underachiever that Larkin had once tried to convince him to recruit as a special class of field support analyst with falsified performance assessments and test scores. A 'Geeks with Guns' idea he had been skeptical about, eventually relented and planned to allow on a provisional basis but then abandoned once Larkin admitted his friend was never really a qualified candidate.

Graham polished off his drink and reached into his top right desk drawer. The paper case was worn and fit loosely around it's now meager contents. He had been to the research facility a few times prior to formally naming the project and had picked up a random deck at the airport news stand fully expecting another boring and unproductive observation of tedious tests and analysis. The lab had no incoming or outgoing communication or data links and while waiting for feasibility results he played more games of solitaire than he could possibly count rather than constantly hovering over the research team.

The then-Director had already approved the new approach, Graham just needed the scientists reviewing what may as well have been the ancient texts and artifacts of a dead prior project. When he officially got the green light he needed in order to request the initial funding for the unnamed project's primary research he had looked down at the writing on the backs of the cards in the draw pile and read the stylized text of the logo with a cartoonish lasso creating a border and a similarly-styled cowboy hat resting askew on the first letter:

'_Omaha Playing Cards_'.

He held onto that same deck and, later in the project, cards representing agents had been used to establish a rough ranking system and default code names. There had only been 39 agents originally included in the project to various degrees, not all of whom had been research subjects but all had been manipulated or otherwise persuaded into various roles outside of typical agent roles. Once no additional candidates or agents were needed, all 2's, 3's, 4's and the 5 of clubs had been disposed of to create a set of agent designations for use in all Project Omaha related activities.

Some agents defied their initial rankings and moved up when higher ranked agents were killed in action or otherwise taken out of service. Others stayed the same - they were still part of an exclusive club. He smiled to think that Sarah Walker, or her earliest incarnation, had once been the Seven of Spades. Only seventeen cards remained of the original 39, plus two extras - one unmarked; one marked.

Graham liked the mystique of it. He liked that those who overheard the code names, usually associated with frighteningly efficient or brutally violent missions, went on to violate protocol and talk in hushed whispers about his 'army'. He liked the notoriety associated with their faceless call signs. Most who had heard a call sign referring to a playing card, to this day, assumed there were a full 52. Or more. Perhaps an entire second deck.

The code name 'Wild Card' had become legendary and was feared by all who didn't consider it some sort of intelligence community ghost story. Many who had witnessed the aftermath of her handiwork first-hand kept the legend alive and many of them believed the designation referred to at least two different agents. Possibly more.

A few lesser resources, like his eventual Nine of Diamonds, defied his initial expectations - by surviving this long, being so resilient and becoming so resourceful - but he had no illusions about her uses. The fact that she came from beginnings so miserable that she considered his offer as an infiltrator to be far less objectionable than staying where she was had been the limit of his consideration of her potential. She was one of three surviving 'Valentine operatives' that he considered part of his elite shadow army - all three managed by Omaha personas to some extent.

His face cards and Aces were the elite of his elite but those ranks had thinned over the years. If earned, agents were moved into those dubious positions of honor. Larkin had the choice of two recently vacated designations when Graham elevated him and it had been no surprise which he had picked. Graham had assumed that it was the more common connotation of the card itself and made some comment to that effect. Larkin had smiled and instead said something he didn't comprehend and had dismissed about being some sort of avenger.

Graham looked once more at the profile of the one-eyed Jack of Hearts with notations in two corners scribbled through and the letters 'BL' written in the upper right corner before tearing it in half and placing it in the secure document destruction bin. Sixteen now. Sixteen plus Walker.

Having originally thrown out the lower ranked cards - and at Larkin's suggestion of the code name 'Joker' - he had reserved one of the wild cards he had neglected to dispose of for his promised computer and technology prodigy. Once Larkin recanted his prior recommendations Graham crossed out the initials he had prematurely added to the card - there would be no 'Field Analysts' or 'Joker Operatives' as he had briefly considered - but he decided to keep the two Jokers as a designation above even his Aces.

.

* * *

.

Graham hadn't mentioned to anyone, including Walker, that he recognized the name Bartowski. He simply directed analysts to dig up intel he partly already knew. If he could fill in any gaps he would do so and simply attribute it to a different intel source. Once the trace signature had come up in LA he had his suspicions that were later confirmed but those details had not yet made their way to Beckman and her NSA team.

He didn't like to be fooled and didn't want to admit he had once been as optimistic for the prospects of the man formerly earmarked for the designation of _Code Name: Joker_ as Larkin himself had once seemed to be. Bartowski was already a major disappointment and of all the people in the world he couldn't believe the only surviving version of the Intersect was sent to him. A cheating hacker who apparently hadn't recovered from or found any new ambition after his expulsion five years ago. Of course Larkin would drag his old friend back into this; Graham's problem child spitting at him from the grave.

As he put the few remaining cards representing the few remaining agents away he held the two Jokers, one in each hand. The one in his left represented both that disappointment and his most significant success from that class of special agents. It was once briefly Bartowski's, but now and forever belonged to Walker.

The frightened rabbit who became a predator.

Once she resolves this mess in Burbank she can be put back in the field and set loose on this new threat his intel reports indicate is rising against the US intelligence community. Hopefully these recent events being betrayed by both Larkin and Ryker won't reduce her effectiveness in any way. Maybe he would appease her by turning her loose on Ryker now that he too had apparently gone rogue.

That disastrous seduction mission - the one she considered a complete failure but he had secretly considered a great success - was an even greater success in retrospect. After those first few months of subsequent successful and lethal incursions and assassinations, he had reassigned her as the Ten of Spades. Shortly thereafter it had become clear what she was now capable of and she began operating without handler oversight; completely autonomously as his King of Diamonds. After Bartowski's candidacy didn't pan out he chose to surpass his vacant Aces completely. Wanting to give her a unique designation but not wanting to reuse the designation 'Joker' he simply chose a different name for the same card.

Instead of a King or an Ace or even the same card described as a 'Joker', she became his Wild Card. Despite his reassurances, she was exactly the killing machine he had hoped for; a mysterious, anonymous entity feared within and outside The Agency.

She had never truly seemed cut out for this role notwithstanding her unparalleled ability to do the job but she was a wolf among sheep now. It had been a long time since he had seen any weakness show through; the weakness of the woman she once might have been.

Not since that last gasp mission intended to find some sort of use for her.

He had made the personnel on site wait for him to debrief her personally. He didn't care that she was still half covered in blood, sitting on the floor leaning against the wall of the briefing room like a broken doll. Her blue eyes somewhat glazed over as she stared hypnotized at the literal blood on her hands.

He had snapped her out of her half-trance by calling her by her true name. The one he knew from that long buried birth certificate he had mentioned at their first meeting. The one they had never spoken of. The one that revealed her as the nineteen year old girl she currently was and ten year old girl she had been when he had first discovered her.

No matter the decisions she had made over the ensuing years, thanks to him this day had been a part of her future for half her life.

But when he barked out her true full name to get her attention he wondered if she had cracked when she had maniacally smiled up at him with nearly half her face a dried crimson mask. She looked up at him from the ground and told him something he already knew.

She said she wasn't that girl anymore.

Then her gaze drifted to the far wall and she wondered aloud, almost too softly for him to hear, how she had become such a monster.

He didn't acknowledge that thought but instead said all the usual placating things - that she was doing what she was trained to do, what was needed of her - that another agent would have been asked to do the same thing and just wouldn't have done it as well.

That she did her job.

That coaxed a disbelieving half-chuckle from her and, though she remained cold and detached, she seemed to come around over the course of the debriefing. He believed a crisis had been averted and told her she would feel better once she got cleaned up and got some rest.

He dismissed her and she showered for most of the next hour.

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* * *

.

She thought if she was going to break down, this would be the place to do it. It was the one place where no one could see her. No one could hear her. As she watched the water spiraling down the drain until it finally, mercifully, ran clear, she wondered if something had broken inside her because the tears never came.

Shortly after the water ran clear, it began to grow cold. She eventually felt the chill start to set in but made no move to shut off the cold water or to dry or warm herself for another half hour. This numbness. This coldness. This was what she needed to ensure that no one would ever see any such weakness from her again. Nothing that could be ever be used against her or possibly get her killed.

This was beyond anything she had ever been taught as a child but she could do it. Learn to accept this need to break the rules she had merely bent a hundred times before as well as the few that had once been unthinkable. And do so without the reluctance she had felt thus far.

She would embrace her training and its emphasis on the rules of survival over the the rules of right and wrong that others had the luxury of following. And she would never have to worry again about anyone seeing any weakness from her. She would wear her masks until they became her face. Until the lie became the truth.

When she finally stepped out of that shower it was with a new determination to accomplish something that would still require some effort and practice. Whatever had broken could stay broken. Whatever was lost was something she wouldn't be needing anymore. She would finally accept the guidance of others and become the version of herself that could survive this world. Her heart had hardened but it wasn't yet stone. She was shivering but she was not yet armored in solid ice.

If she wanted to survive, she would have to achieve both.

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* * *

.

Graham returned his thoughts to the present and once again examined the playing card in his left hand - a maniacal jester's face laughing with delight in its center with initials he knew to be a 'CB' scribbled out in the lower right corner and an 'SW' written in the upper left redefining the card's meaning.

Joker. Wild Card. Synonymous to most people but in his mind the difference between his program's greatest success and one of its most disappointing failures.

He had no reason to believe there had been any other such near breakdowns over the years. If there had been, she had successfully kept them to herself. But she had been doing this longer than he had ever thought she would last. He saw no reason to believe, even given the recent betrayals, that she wouldn't be able to continue to hold it together.

At least keep herself operational long enough that they can revive the program and eventually he won't need to worry about her fragile psyche any more. About the day when his well-worn favorite toy was finally broken.

He then looked at the Joker in his right hand with no markings whatsoever in any of it's four corners. He hadn't added anyone to his Omaha list in a long time. Since becoming Director he hadn't been quite as closely involved in the ongoing research or recruitment as before. He was one of the few people who even knew which agents were Omaha operatives. Including the operatives themselves.

Diving back in could wait until the project's final phase became operational. Of his previous recruits, Walker was the only agent who had earned that 'Ace of Aces' distinction. At least until they could reconstruct his desired version of what they now called The Intersect and use what they had learned to build the Cipher 2.0 to achieve what Project Omaha had set out to do.

He tore the pristine Joker card in half as he had done with Larkin's Jack of Hearts and reunited the two cards in the document destruction bin. He didn't need it. Would never need it. Soon he would have a small army of wild cards.

One day soon, he can simply make several more just like her.

Graham placed the card bearing Charles Bartowski's obscured initials and Sarah Walker's clearly printed ones back in the worn and tattered box, poured another drink and waited for her to contact him from the LA substation. He grinned against his glass as he thought about just what this Bartowski had coming for him.

_Wait until Larkin's little friend has to deal with a true wild card._

Not simply someone unpredictable as the phrase was often flippantly intended but someone who could do what she had done in Budapest. Dozens of missions in dozens of other cities across the globe just like it or worse. Dozen of missions where she had been the only one to walk away, almost always completely unscathed.

Death incarnate.

Someone very few people even knew by the same name. Someone he himself had known by over a hundred cover identities. As Jenny. As Sarah. Template 34. Subject Zero. Seven of spades. Wild Card.

Enforcer.

She would never realize just how much he had manipulated the lives, actions and even thought processes of over three dozen agents, none more than her. She never could have become the legendary figure she was without him pulling the strings. If the choices had truly been hers, she likely would have ended up someone entirely different.

What a waste that would have been.

Once rebuilt, the Cipher 2.0 would make the process that much easier, but with the lucky coincidences and hard work required to mold her he would always regard her as his greatest creation. The agent who should not be had ultimately become the agent without a name; the agent that all others feared.

Graham returned to his desk as one of three phones buzzed, knowing that his assistant had been instructed to only allow a call from one person through. She would have this mess resolved for him in no time.

She _was_ a monster. But she was _his_ monster.

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* * *

END OF LINE

END OF SUBROUTINE

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A/N2: Thank you again to everyone who has stuck with me and read this extremely long prologue! In two weeks, see you all in Burbank for Sarah Walker's next mission and the beginning of our story proper...


	5. V: Waxing Nostalgic

Becoming

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BOOK ONE

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"Complications"

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* * *

"Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected,

unplanned by me."

- Carl Sandburg

* * *

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General A/N: Thank you to everyone who has read and especially those who have been so supportive. You will likely find it a relief that future installments will less frequently be of the single mega-chapter variety. But wouldn't it be disappointing if you saw an update on this story and it were only 2,500 words? I am assuming your answer is 'Yes' and hoping it isn't 'No' because I still intend to publish 10K+ installments - hopefully every two weeks - but will be more regularly breaking them into many smaller, more manageable chapters.

Those of you who have the opportunity and inclination to power through the whole 'set', feel free to do so. Those of you who do not will more often than not have the ability to read an entire chapter (or two) then return as needed or desired to complete the remaining chapters. I have also modified the story categories after checking with a few people and confirming that it wasn't really _THAT_ angsty. No, I did not take that as a challenge but instead changed 'Angst' to 'Drama' (though neither is entirely accurate).

I had always planned to add 'Romance' at this point (having also added someone to the character list). Some of you are already starting to see the point of this story. But to be clear, we have all already seen the perspective of a nerd who thinks he is unworthy of the quintessential video game / comic book goddess and ultimately finds much more to her. This is the perspective of the reluctant assassin who thinks there's no going back and that _she_ is unworthy of the kind, clever, funny, sweet man she finds herself assigned to protect. The folly of thinking of others as too perfect and yourself as too imperfect. The wt/wt of canon is treated here as less 'will they' and more 'why they don't'.

I obviously have little experience with such things but I imagine there is nothing more daunting, terrifying and nauseating for a writer than realizing you have put yourself in a position where you decide the most appropriate course of action is to actually type the words "Book One".

So it begins.

Again.

(Derp!)

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Part V: Waxing Nostalgic

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...in which our protagonist reflects on her former partner's death, events from her childhood and the nature of identity on her way to confront her next target - a man who is not at all what she expected...

Canon Timeline Reference: earlier parts of 'Chuck vs. the Intersect' (aka 'the Pilot'; episode 1.01) including federally mandated meet cute scene including minor flashback elements of 'Nacho Sampler' (episode 3.06) and through second (non-ninja) meeting. Also includes a reference to a somewhat 'throwaway' line from 'Angel de la Muerte' (episode 3.03).

Contents: Hurray! Five chapters, all short(-ish); the longest is _barely_ over 3K words but it's over 12K in total; digest as you see fit!

A/N: I have modified the floor plan of Sarah's hotel suite slightly for reasons that will become apparent later while - hopefully - not upsetting anyone's mental image. It's still very white and green. Special thanks to my official Southern!Californiaologist for confirmations of Highway/Interstate layouts and usage. - V -

Disclaimers / Easter Eggs: No ownership of, or claim to the television show CHUCK or the movie _Tron_ is asserted or implied. Additionally, in this part, no ownership of, or claim to James Bond (it's so genericized I'm not sure it needs to be called out) or _You_ _Only Live Twice, _specifically (Ian Fleming novel), any sexy bespectacled villainesses from _G.I._ _Joe_, the _Batman_ movie (1989 Tim Burton version) and it's sequel, Batman in general, Tim Burton films in general, oh hell - any DC or Marvel comics, somewhat similar comic book related conversations in _Kill Bill vol. 2_, the entire Indiana Jones franchise (except anything with Shia LeBouf - blech!), Disney's _Sleeping Beauty_, or any song by Ani DiFranco, Bon Jovi or Smashing Pumpkins is asserted or implied. (phew!)

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007: This Mortal Coil

Interstate 5, Southbound, 30 miles north of Los Angeles; Wed Sept 19, 2007 1:36 pm

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Bryce is dead.

Just past Santa Clarita, the physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted woman once again calling herself Sarah Walker exited the 5, made an immediate U-turn and got right back on - now heading in the opposite direction. She made arrangements with Graham to visit his LA substation to collect more background intel for an urgent intelligence gathering operation focused on the man with whom Bryce was apparently working.

Someone named Bartowski.

She hung up with Graham and tried to take the opportunity to get her head straight.

As she racked her brain attempting to recall what little she really knew about her partner, she couldn't remember Bryce ever mentioning anyone named Bartowski from his past. She knew Bryce at least claimed to be an orphan - _Just like James Bond_ he liked to say citing a story called _You Only Live Twice_ - and matter-of-factly said he was a trust fund baby. But he also said he had severed all ties to his former life. That was why he didn't care that people knew his real name.

In her experience, that was not an uncommon opinion of an agent. They were either like Bryce, feeling as though they had nothing to lose and not caring to hide who they once were because it meant nothing to them or, like her, didn't want to reveal anything of themselves due to ties that could be used against them or other ghosts of their pasts.

She realized, as she considered what that might mean, that she really didn't know with any certainty if his parents actually were dead or if one or both were alive but estranged from their son. It was unlikely that he intended to cut ties to protect the people that were important to him or he wouldn't have kept his birth name. She didn't know for certain if there were parents or siblings or even friends who would miss and mourn him.

But neither had she shared such things with him.

She was in the hyper-alert yet clinically detached state of mind he had often referred to as 'Agent Mode' and found herself to be more angry than sad to learn that Bryce had been killed. They had been partners off and on for over two years. Both of them were frequently assigned individually to separate missions for extended periods but Graham liked to pair them up nearly as often. Graham said they leveled each other out. Bryce had spent nearly half that first year trying to get in her pants. Not in an obnoxious constant way but every time she thought he had given up he dialed up the charm again.

Most of it was relatively tame, typical nonsense that made her roll her eyes but he did occasionally make her smile. On one such occasion, when he had managed to coax a single sharp bark of a laugh out of her, he had let it slip that he got his best material from one of his brothers. It had only stood out to her as odd because he had previously said other small things that implied that he was an only child and the mood had immediately cooled at the apparent lie.

She just assumed he was as private as she was - that he didn't want to share his past either - and was so used to lying that he eventually contradicted himself. That he either didn't care enough to worry about it or was comfortable enough around her to not worry about the contradiction.

She didn't know which was true but he would have been right to not be worried about it. She felt no need to pry or even care, really, about his parents or any potential siblings.

Some ghosts were better left alone.

Sure, he was undeniably very attractive but she had wanted to remain professional; she hadn't even considered giving in to his advances until after a mission that provided a tense moment or two but honestly wasn't particularly harrowing or noteworthy in any special way other than being their first mission posing as a married couple.

After two solid days of travel and emotional turmoil she really just wanted a long, hot bath. Or to sleep for a month. In whichever order she could manage. She checked into a luxury hotel 10 minutes north of her target under the name Sarah Walker. As a former teammate would say "What the hell, Uncle Sam's good for it." and it was just for a couple of days. But it felt unnatural to use that name. She was now on mission and she had never been Sarah Walker while on a mission.

She located her room on the eighth floor and checked the exit routes both conventional and less so. There was a large inviting bed that was beckoning her mockingly. It's gigantic green upholstered headboard which matched the two chairs flanking the table by the panoramic window was set off against a metallic silver wallpaper with stylized fleurs de lis. There was also a small sofa in this large front room, a decent sized bath with an equally inviting free-standing tub and a small but cozy sitting room / office behind the vanity opposite the bed that opened up to a small balcony she would have to more thoroughly explore later. She unpacked her gear and contemplated how to even begin to approach a mission as Sarah Walker.

Sarah Walker was not a fleshed out personality profile meant to be applied as a cover. Sarah Walker had a completely fake business degree from Columbia University with decent but not stellar grades, minimal security clearances and a sparse service record indicating more classified projects than individual actions and many periods of inactivity. At a glance she looked like an abandoned draft of a cover identity.

Her mission was simple enough in theory. Make contact with Bryce's accomplice, determine to where the massive amount of intelligence data had been transferred, recover the data and detain or eliminate anyone else involved. Unfortunately their intelligence on why and how Bryce had done what he had done was limited. She was going to have to play some things by ear.

She reluctantly conceded that Graham had been right about the two of them - at least as professional partners. It was times like these when Bryce would ordinarily be trying to keep things light. She was all about mission prep, he was all about staying loose and relaxed. She had initially been put off by his cockiness but he unerringly delivered in the field - achievement of mission objectives rather than adherence to the actual plan being the measuring stick - and that confidence wasn't unjustified.

Once she began to accept this as fact, his cockiness began to amuse her slightly and did keep her from getting overly wrapped up or stressing over details they had covered a dozen times. He would always say he had faith in their plans - usually meaning _her_ plans. He never coddled her or treated her as anything less than an equal partner. He did his part and trusted her to do hers. In that way, he always came through for her.

He was a walking, talking lucky charm.

Untouchable.

The Teflon man.

At least until last night.

Graham had informed her that the NSA security detail around this 'Intersect' had shot him once in the chest as he exited the building. She could almost picture the laugh on his lips when he thought he was home free and winced at the mental image of his reaction when he was cut down with his freedom in sight. She wondered if he had skimped on his planning. If, had he trusted her to help him, her attention to detail would have made a difference.

Then she remembered that it had been a rogue action with an unknown motivation. That he had betrayed her not only personally but also professionally by betraying the nation for which she had sacrificed so much.

He was shot in the act of stealing intelligence from a top secret government facility. If it had been her standing outside as he fled the building, and if he had refused to stand down, she would have shot him herself.

She had never thought it would come to that but she had a duty to uphold. The life of an agent was only partly as advertised with a much darker side she should have anticipated but she had taken pride in discovering that she was the person best suited to bear such burdens. It was the thing that she clung to - that when all the politicking and individual agendas were stripped away her actions had - _in spite_ of some of those in positions of authority and their various agendas - preserved the lives of ordinary Americans in ways they would never appreciate or understand. That all she had done had meant _something_.

After all she had done she simply _had_ to believe that - the alternative was too horrifying to even consider. In the end, the choice would have been simple.

It would have been no choice at all.

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* * *

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She followed Graham's instructions and drove to a nondescript building in downtown Los Angeles where she checked in using the code phrase he had given her. She was familiar with this unofficial field office and followed the convoluted protocols through the bowels of the building to reach the isolated area that housed Graham's designated contact to review any additional intel to plan her approach.

It was all very rushed and that made her even more uncomfortable. She had no acceptable clean clothes with her and, driven by exhaustion, bullied the one female analyst into swapping outfits with her. She had an inspired idea to minimize the memory of her unexpected arrival and softened the blow by commenting on how good her clothes looked on the young woman as they changed side-by-side in the ladies room.

She suggested that the analyst shake out her long, dark hair and felt strange satisfaction at how confident the analyst seemed when she replaced her glasses out of necessity and made a comment about looking like a 'baroness'. A comment that caused a niggle in her memory she couldn't quite place but that was quickly replaced by even more satisfaction. This time at the success of her plan when the other two analysts paid more attention to their colleague - now standing equal to her in height due to their fortuitously switchable shoes and decked out in her discarded all black outfit - than to the agent upon their return from the restroom.

For her part, the analyst - so recently objecting over sacrificing her own outfit - now seemed quite pleased with the attentions of one of her colleagues in particular.

Small victories were something to cherish in the shadow of a partnership blown to pieces. She was a planner and she felt like she had been on her heels for a few weeks now. She felt unsettled and was having a hard time focusing but in order to restore some illusion of order to her life she needed to resolve the mess her former partner made.

Her dead partner.

Her dead lover.

She wasn't even sure how to describe him. Bryce had never been her 'boyfriend' and they never 'dated'. At least they had never discussed such things. There was a brief period of time when she had briefly thought she might have been in love with him until reality convinced her otherwise. But they had traveled the world together without crowding each other or prying into each others' pasts. Provided some fleeting physical comfort to each other in a world of madness and lies. Gotten into - and out of - thrilling adventures together.

They were a formidable team. It was everything she thought she craved as a young girl but there was something undefinable missing. And she found that she resented him for not considering the fact that his actions had left her here alone.

That he had taken the easy way out. She thought for a moment that she was being unfair, but it seemed more unfair that she now had no one she could trust to have her back. But it occurred to her, that despite his professional dependability, he had never been particularly considerate or even very kind.

He wasn't remotely faithful but she never asked or expected him to be. He had no problem with suggesting that she seduce a mark to achieve their objectives. No jealousy on the rare occasions when she agreed it was the most practical course of action. He had no problem volunteering to do the same and often lived out his juvenile James Bond fantasies. Whether this was strictly necessary was often debatable but never debated.

She knew he reveled in it but he usually had the courtesy not to flaunt it. When he found something objectionable about one of his marks he whined like a petulant child. She knew he slept around when they were parted for separate assignments. For her part, she was technically faithful but it was more out of a combination of convenience, patience and disillusionment rather than any real devotion.

But he usually didn't give her any shit over anything she had done in her past - the things she had done to complete _her_ missions - and she had never questioned his actions. Until now. And now that she did she wondered if the man who had never let her down had actually let her down completely.

The only thing they had shared was a reluctance to share anything. What she had considered a good partner was a far cry from what anyone should hope for in a good friend much less a lover or a boyfriend.

And she had been alone all along.

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* * *

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As she rolled into the parking lot of the Buy More she was still receiving intel from the field office she had just left. "So you think this kid's got the Intersect?" she asked of the analyst on the other end of her call. It amused her slightly that she automatically referred to her target as a kid based on his age and history despite the fact that he was nearly a year older than her. She may be younger but she had seen things he cannot possibly imagine.

She had been surprised that the analyst she coordinated with even knew the name of the project but that was apparently all he knew about it. The name and that her former partner was the center point of their investigation. "That's right, Agent Walker. He's connected to Bryce Larkin."

He was the only analyst of the three she had met who was cleared to work with her on this. Handpicked by Graham who had been on their conference call from the substation earlier. "Weaknesses?"

The analyst had been focused on gathering the life story of her target - Charles Irving Bartowski. She thought it sounded like a pretentious name. Bartowski was originally from Connecticut but relocated to Southern California in his youth. As intel continued to come in she found she had become numb to the fact that she was learning as much about Bryce as she was about Bartowski. Information that people in an intimate relationship should know about each other. The lack of that knowledge only reinforced a long-brewing realization that - apart from the physical - their so-called relationship had been anything but intimate.

Among those facts were that Bryce, too, was originally from Connecticut. And had attended Stanford as her target had. Some sort of supposed computer prodigy who had been expelled in his senior year.

_Great. A computer geek who not only did something bad enough to be expelled but had suffered the added indignity of being incompetent enough to get caught._

Bryce had rarely made questionable decisions - or at least decisions that turned out to be questionable - but this was looking like the second in two days.

There didn't seem to be any indication of a connection in the intervening years - between residing in the same state and going to the same university - but she didn't want to rule anything out. Maybe Bartowski came from money like Bryce had and that was their connection. That could mean powerful people might become involved at some point in her investigation but she didn't want to speculate. And she discounted that idea entirely as she looked up at the green and gold Buy More logo over the retail electronics store.

"Bright. But an underachiever." The connection to Bryce was growing more tenuous as she stepped through the sliding glass doors and into retail hell.

"Lonely. Had his heart broken and never got over it." Now _that_ she could work with.

"I'm uploading his picture now." Cute but goofy, was her unfiltered reaction. With a pleasant smile and unruly, curly brown hair he looked like a nice enough, unassuming person. Just the type Bryce could have easily manipulated. If Bryce could play him he should be putty in her hands.

She reached into her purse and extracted the 'broken' Intercell phone that the field office had provided her as an excuse for approaching her target. Before she ended her call and put away her fully functioning Blackberry she said without thinking "Piece of cake."

She visibly cringed when she realized what she had said.

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008: Piece of Cake

Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Mon Jun 15, 1992 7:35 pm

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"Got that, Darlin'?"

Her father had just told her their plans for next weekend. She was Katie O'Connell here. There was a music festival called _Summerfest_ starting next weekend which meant lots of people. Lots of distracted and impaired people.

She didn't like this one. There was no art to it. It was straight stealing. Katie would pull the lost kid routine or otherwise create distractions and give him a chance to lift wallets and unattended bags. Her pickpocketing was just as good but, to his credit, he preferred Katie not be the one caught red handed as it were. She liked to think of her other self in the third person when she didn't like what she was doing. It was a practice that would help her compartmentalize far more objectionable actions as an adult.

"Sure Dad." she said. "Piece of cake."

"Never say anything is a piece of cake." He snapped at her as she knew he would. "Just like you never say you're pulling 'one last con'. You'll jinx it."

She knew that too. She didn't believe a word of it - she didn't have a superstitious bone in her body - but she remembered everything he'd ever said. She had just dared to hope that one specific word would give him an opening to say something clever and surprise her. It did happen sometimes. Often, in fact - he was a pretty clever guy. It just didn't this time.

Instead he looked down at her ankles and noted the hem of her jeans was at least two inches higher than it should be. She had noticed too but didn't want to say anything. She had grown six inches in the past eight months but outgrowing clothes meant buying new or new-ish clothes which meant spending money. Money he had earmarked for setting up their next con or their next life. Money that had been uncharacteristically short recently.

"Dammit, you're getting too damn tall to pull these jobs." he muttered mostly to himself.

_Well, yeah..._ she thought _I'm TEN now_.

"We'll have to retire some of the old standbys soon. You're starting to stand out." Her father looked at her squarely in the face and smiled before his face went blank as though he was seeing her for the first time. "And we can't have you looking so pretty that people will remember you."

She was elated for a millisecond that her father had called her pretty until she realized it was couched in a negative. Until he turned it around on her as something she would have to conceal.

She had been thinking about asking him if she could start wearing make up. Just a little lip gloss or something. She hung out with a few 12 and 13 year old girls around the run-down apartment complex. She knew she was tall for her age and she had always been more comfortable with older kids so she simply fit in - as much as she could while lying to them about who she really was - more accurately, she just didn't stand out. Those girls wore make up. Those girls had told her she was pretty. Or would be one day. But make up was another expense she knew wasn't in her father's plans. And her father preferred her to be inconspicuous.

Being inconspicuous meant not looking like a street urchin but also no makeup or anything else she saw the other girls experimenting with. Her first priority was to blend into the background as much as possible and, if the shit went down, become a ghost.

He stood up and began to put on his jacket and she suddenly knew the words she was waiting to hear weren't going to come. To be fair, they had changed identities a lot recently and it was pretty confusing sometimes. They had already celebrated last month but she had still hoped he would remember. For the last two years they had celebrated both the false and the true.

"I've gotta go see a guy about a potential job." The way he said 'job', Katie knew he didn't mean actual employment. "I'll probably be late so you'll have to make yourself some dinner, Darlin'."

He did lean in to kiss her on the crown of her head and tussle her hair on his way out as he often did, but that was that.

She wasn't hungry anymore. Especially not for cake.

She decided to go for a walk instead and, after a few hours of making her usual rounds (which included a convenience store with a small gap between the back of the cigarette cage and the chip rack that most adults wouldn't be able to fit their hand through), ended up sneaking into the movie theater eight blocks away.

She hadn't had much opportunity to see many movies over the past couple of years usually only even having a TV when they stayed in hotels. Televisions were inconvenient luxuries when you might have to skip town at a moment's notice.

But there's a boy named Tommy that works here and the two of them have an arrangement. She steals cigarettes for him and when he's working the booth or even sees her outside he lets her in without a ticket whenever she wants. She had deftly pocketed a pack of Camels for him and pale pink lip gloss as a present for herself before deliberately being shooed out of the store for something _other_ than shoplifting by speed-reading half their magazines And making a big show of doing so.

This theater already received its prints for next weekend's premier of the new Batman movie - the sequel to the one she saw three years ago when she was still the girl she was born as - and the employees are watching it tonight after midnight. They all know her and don't question her presence, curled up alone in the corner of the back row.

She likes the back row. She can sit there unmolested and observe. Tonight it's just employees and their friends from school all gathered in the center of the fifth, sixth and seventh rows rather than her preferred regular crowd. The boys and girls on awkward dates, the established couples far more comfortable with one another, the rowdy groups of teenage boys pathetically trying to impress each other and any girl or woman that encroaches into their air space.

And the people who are like her. The few loners who just want to see the film but who might occasionally - if struck with a bout of honesty with themselves - admit they wished they had someone with them. Someone who shared their interests and would sit comfortably and enjoy the same things or argue a particular point or laugh with them in the wrong places due to some secret joke. Someone who _knew_ them. Someone who knew _her_.

But she hadn't found that here - just those few girls at the apartment complex that she hung out with occasionally who talk incessantly about boys she doesn't know, and teachers she doesn't know and crappy bands she doesn't listen to. TV shows she's never seen and certainly not the hundreds of books _she_ has read in their place for entertainment. She hadn't bothered to enroll in school when they moved here so near to the end of the previous school year. In a couple of months they would likely move on. Sooner if this job her father had mentioned went smoothly. Even sooner if it went badly.

Maybe things would be different in their next city. Their next life.

A few employees were very excited about the film and decided to start a little earlier than the promised 'midnight showing'. The lights dimmed and the film started to roll and she fed herself a fist full of popcorn. She had agonized for ten minutes over the decision to spend a couple of dollars on a small box of popcorn that passes for the dinner she skipped but she figured she deserved a treat before the clock struck midnight.

Tommy's girlfriend, Gina, works the concessions counter and, with a pitying smile, ended up giving her their largest size completely free of charge.

After all, it's her birthday.

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009: Vicki Vale

Buy More, Nerd Herd Desk, Burbank, CA; Wed Sept 19, 2007 4:38 pm

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"Stop the presses. It's Vicki Vale." the shorter, bearded man had let spill from his mouth. Her target hadn't even noticed her. Or was making a good show of deliberately not noticing her.

She already had Bryce and her father floating around inside her head and hearing those precise words dredged up another long buried memory. It was one of her few memories of what she mockingly thought of as her 'real life' and one of the last ones. It was somewhat random but she associated it with her mother. The woman she had just seen earlier this morning for the first time in eighteen years and would likely never see again.

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Geneva, Illinois; Fri Jun 23, 1989 6:45 pm

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She had just turned seven years old and Mom let her go to the movies with a group of eight friends from the neighborhood ranging in age from seven to thirteen. To be honest, - _and you must always be honest, sweetie_ - the group ranged from about nine and a half to thirteen years old; she was by far the youngest.

The theater was only two blocks away from the tiny little house they shared with her grandmother since her Mom and Dad had split up. She went to that theater so often that Mom didn't give it a second thought when her favorite companion had been around to accompany her. Now she still allowed it as long as Janet, the oldest girl who sometimes babysat if Gran was feeling particularly unwell, was there.

Dad still came around to visit from time to time and took her for ice cream though Mom and Gran didn't like for her to go off alone with him. Sometimes he'd come by after her bed time on nights Mom had class and she would sneak out her window for some too-short secret adventure.

She had told her Mom they were going to see _Honey, I Shrunk the Kids_ which she would swear to this day was definitely _not_ a lie. She had specifically said – "May I go? _They're_ going to see _Honey, I Shrunk the Kids_." And 'they' _were_ going to see that movie - if you knew that 'they' meant three of the five girls. The three boys, Janet and Janet's little sister were going to see _Batman_. And so was she.

Mom told her she was super smart and had pushed to move her up to first grade when she was already able to read to herself at an unusually high level for her age when she enrolled in kindergarten. Mom let her hang out with the older kids because she thought the other kids her age - or even those a year older now - were 'babies' and Mom said she was responsible enough that she trusted her. Mom called her an 'old soul'.

Dad told her she was smart too but Dad was an entirely different kind of smart. Dad played games with her all the time saying one thing but meaning something different than what you had inferred from the words themselves. "You have to be careful with people..." he had told her "...there are all kinds of ways to lie."

_Batman_ was rated PG-13, which was apparently a big deal to Mom. Since she was such an avid reader, Mom loved that she read at such a high level and she had a preference for the classics she had argued that if she could read about more mature themes she should be able to see movies that contained the same types of things. Mom smiled brightly at that and said she appreciated the quality of her argument but she wasn't comfortable with all the violence she thought PG-13 movies contained.

She thought G-rated movies were boring. She liked some of the Disney movies but didn't think you had to see them in a theater. She thought the Disney princess movies were cute but wished the princesses didn't have to be rescued so much. If she were Sleeping Beauty she would have wanted to be the one to fight that witch when she turned into a dragon instead of just waiting around for a kiss to bring her back to life. And she wished that the princes who supposedly personified all the princesses' hopes and dreams could be more than grinning cardboard cutouts. She just didn't see why the girls had to run off with them and immediately get married.

Mom was OK with her seeing PG movies because Mom said she didn't really object to anything in them and would just sit next to her. But reactions to that second Indiana Jones movie had really screwed things up for her.

David's big brother had all the best TV equipment. He was even planning on getting _Star Wars_ on Laserdisc and she was looking forward to seeing it. But they had all already seen the first two Indiana Jones movies on BetaMax. Apparently a bunch of parents thought the second one - and some other recent movies - were too violent and a stronger rating was needed for future films.

She had rewatched both movies with the same group of kids before sneaking into the theater with the bolder ones to see the third movie a few weeks ago. She loved the fantastical adventure of it all. The globe trotting she had realized was possible when she was told her own home town shared a name with a city in Switzerland - also by a lake, that the historic windmill everyone around here knew was based on those in _another_ nearby country called Holland and that _both_ of those countries were just a small part of a place called Europe.

She read everything she could get her hands on about other places and hoped one day she would be able to visit them all and do something even half as exciting and important as Indiana Jones. This third movie was pretty funny too with things she thought her Dad would appreciate - bluffing about the guy who got lost in his own museum, stealing his nickname from the family dog, the trick of knowing what sort of cup a humble carpenter might have - and she was especially fascinated by the idea that something like that cup could save someone's life. And it was fun that he got to run off with his dad and have this adventure - something she herself had been considering.

But they had to sneak in because it was rated PG-13. PG-13 and it wasn't even all that violent.

PG-13 was the bane of her young existence.

But she had been waiting patiently for _Batman_ since she heard the regulars talking about it at the comic book store she still frequented. The _Beetlejuice_ guy was directing it, they had told her, so hopes were high that it would have the right feel for the Dark Knight. Of course, the silly guy who played Beetlejuice himself was cast as Batman and that was a cause for some concern.

She liked Batman. He didn't get bitten by a spider or stand too close to a Gamma bomb or stumble across a power ring or take a super-soldier serum. Although she stopped to consider that only the first three were really accidents. She did have some respect for the Captain - he had made the choice to become a super soldier even if he really hadn't had to work for his powers afterwards.

Bruce Wayne had decided he wanted to fight crime and molded himself into a super hero with no actual super powers. How scary would that be? To face off against super-villains with no crutch of invincibility or super-strength, just your own resourcefulness and the skills you taught yourself. David said he was driven into it, that it was his destiny, but she said that he chose it. They agreed to disagree.

Even though he was almost the complete opposite, she also liked Superman. Not the comics themselves so much but the idea of him. And not the more recent portrayals, she liked the older comics. The ones where he was different from the rest and embraced it even though it meant he would never really fit in.

He _was_ Superman. His real name, that no one on Earth knew, was Kal-El. When he changed into his alter ego he didn't become the super version of himself like all the others, he became Clark Kent. When he hid his true self he tried to become someone _normal_. Why would you ever want to be normal if you could be a superhero?

If his secret identity was ever exposed people would foolishly say that Clark Kent was Superman but they would be oblivious to the truth.

There was no Clark Kent.

She often wondered if she was already who she was born to be or did she need to _become_ who she was meant to be. Was there an inescapable destiny for her, as David believed, or were there important choices yet to be made?

She liked some of the female super heroes too; Wonder Woman, Black Canary, Jean Grey, Ms. Marvel. They were strong and incredibly beautiful but they just didn't get the same quality of stories as the guys. That was one of the things she was looking forward to seeing in the Batman movie. The characters they had chosen to interact with Batman were the Joker (duh) and Vicki Vale.

Vicki Vale didn't get as much play as Lois Lane did in the Superman books but she was similar in that both reporters often came very close to uncovering the secret identities of their respective super heroes. She was like a detective and modeled after Marilyn Monroe. She was beautiful _and_ smart. What she thought a woman should be. Like her Mom.

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* * *

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As she walked home later, she thought about the movie and decided it was just OK. She didn't like that a young Joker was the one who killed Batman's parents. It was tidy for a movie but the whole point of Joe Chill - the man from the comics who 'really' killed Thomas and Martha Wayne in front of their young son - was that he was just some guy. A common street thug who had destroyed Bruce Wayne's world in a sudden and pointless act of violence. That's why Batman didn't fight _just_ super-villains like most other superheroes; he protected the citizens of Gotham from everyone.

And Alfred letting Vicki Vale into the Bat Cave was sacrilege. _No one_ gets into the Bat Cave. What good is a secret identity if you don't keep it secret?

Vicki herself was good and bad. She went into the movie looking forward to seeing a smart, beautiful woman. And she was definitely beautiful. Janet, who was old enough to start wearing make-up, called her 'show-stopper beautiful' and she agreed. Vicki was smart enough to figure out that Batman was Bruce Wayne - or vice versa - which was great but she found herself wishing Vicki wasn't portrayed as being so weak. Granted, a disfigured psychopath in clown makeup with a small army at his disposal was wreaking havoc all around her but she could have been a little tougher – not just a damsel in distress. Why _couldn't_ a woman be a kick ass super hero without super powers?

She caught a glimpse of her mother in the front window as she walked up the sidewalk, kicking the dirt as she pondered how to become a super hero, and reappraised what she thought a woman should be. Mom and Dad had fought often but never for very long - a lot more lately of course. At least Dad was fun. Obviously trying to compensate but he always had some crazy adventure planned for just the two of them every time he came to visit her. Mom was always so serious.

She usually went outside and didn't really listen to what they were saying when they fought. She didn't want to be part of it and didn't want to hear if she already was. If they were arguing about what she had done. So she pretended she didn't know what they were fighting about - although she could guess - but they yelled a lot. She often wondered if Mom would be happier without her around to remind her how things used to be and generally give her more to worry about.

She used to be greeted at the sidewalk. She used to not walk home alone. Everything had changed. Maybe it was time to change some more. At least Dad never hit Mom like Janet's dad but Mom never backed down. She doubted Dad would ever do such a thing but she knew Mom would never stand for it. She worked two jobs and went to night school to finish her degree to hopefully become a teacher while raising a kid and taking care of a sick mother. If Gran and herself weren't around Mom could do so much more. She shouldn't have to be so tough all the time.

And Mom wasn't a crime fighter but she _was_ tough. Tough as nails. Tough enough to start over if she left and the obviously inevitable happened to Gran. Even after the events of the past few months she had never seen her Mom cry.

Beautiful, smart _and_ tough. That's what she wanted to be.

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* * *

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Buy More, Nerd Herd Desk, Burbank, CA; Wed Sept 19, 2007 4:38 pm

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The familiar memory had overtaken her for only a millisecond. It was such a part of her that she didn't have to relive it in its entirety to feel the full impact but she found it hard to break away from. Hard to believe there was a time when she fretted over movie ratings. Even went to movies. Or read comic books. Or had friends. Or even was a little girl.

When her mother personified responsibility and serious things and being trapped by them. When her dad personified fun and adventure and an escape from the harsh realities of the world.

She had always been smart. Life made her tough. The CIA made her beautiful.

And smarter.

And tougher.

She was everything she ever thought she wanted to be and she felt completely empty. Her lack of emotion over Bryce's death was all the evidence she needed that her soul had been hollowed out somewhere along the way.

She shouldn't have come straight here.

She should have taken more time to get her head straight but Graham had been adamant that time was a luxury they didn't have.

"Vicki Vale – Vic-a-Vicki Vale – Vicki Vale – Vikkity – Vikkity Vale"

She shook off the memory and approached the man with the curly hair from the picture. He was pressing a telephone receiver between his ear and his shoulder and holding a manilla folder in his hands, rapping about a relatively obscure comic book character that Sarah Walker should know nothing about.

Sarah Walker - the _real_ Sarah Walker - the one behind the beautiful mask - _that_ Sarah Walker would eat Vicki Vale alive.

And even then poor Vicki would be oblivious to the truth.

There was no Sarah Walker.

A predatory smile automatically morphed into something less sinister and more endearing as she stepped up to the counter and smiled. She felt the reassuring power of her CIA engineered presence when she approached her target. And felt immense satisfaction when his eyes met hers and he dropped both the phone and the folder.

She was _almost_ entirely unaffected by the adorably cute akimbo pose he clumsily struck when he realized he couldn't disguise how stunned he had been by the mere sight of her.

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* * *

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010: Disarm You With a Smile

Buy More; Nerd Herd Desk; Wed Sept 19, 2007 4:39 pm

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The stress of the past few days is getting to her. Try as she might to push it all out of her mind, seeing her mother stirred up all kinds of shit she thought long since buried. Bryce's death had apparently shocked her into numbness. She was a raw nerve and planned to take it out on the person Bryce was conspiring with to betray her, the government and anyone else on whose behalf she could find it in herself to be indignant.

Her smile was automatic as her target dropped the items he was holding. She could see she had already had an effect on him and he looked a bit like a little boy caught doing something he shouldn't be. Maybe he didn't expect to be found so soon and she couldn't let his adorably clumsy reaction to her lull her in. So she mentally girded herself for battle and deliberately thought to herself: _OK, Bryce. Let's see what this partner of yours is made of_.

After she sarcastically apologized for interrupting, he stammered an excuse for his Vicki Vale rap and she heard herself respond without thinking "Because that makes it better." She hoped it rattled him a bit so she could gauge his reaction but she had intended to come off sweeter, more demure. She had let too much of her true self slip through and needed to focus.

Rather than the embarrassed reaction she expected he just smiled an earnest, engaging and slightly relieved smile back at her - clearly appreciating her mild level of snark.

It was disconcerting.

She sized him up quickly and, from his unruly hair to his gangly frame, he seemed to be still growing into himself at the age of barely twenty-six. But his eyes sparkled with equal measures of mischief and warmth and that sweet smile drew her back in as he - and his coworker who was gawking at her more openly than her target - made their introductions.

He had recovered from the stammering beginning and found his feet. It wasn't lost on her that he had quickly and subtly sized her up as well nor that his eyes then met hers and stayed focused there or glancing to her mouth as he listened intently to what she was saying rather than ogling her. He didn't seem terribly comfortable talking to her with her flirty act going but he wasn't frozen either.

Her own sarcastic sense of humor had seemed to work so she continued with it rather than abruptly shifting personalities. _Chuck and Morgan. And they're stuck with those. I've had some pretty bad ones but there's always next week_ - but these were their names. Their real names. And they were comfortable in them. Something unfamiliar to her. As awkward as they thought they were, and as she expected them to be, in the presence of a beautiful woman their goofy banter was not forced - it was just _them_. And she found it strangely endearing.

Sarah Walker was as close as she got to a second skin. A go-to persona for simple activities, not utilized for a retrieval mission like this. As comfortable as an old sweat shirt. As far as the CIA was concerned Sarah Walker was a mid-level analyst with the vague title of 'Efficiency Expert' that rotated around the world performing internal reviews of field offices. Which as near as anyone could tell meant confiscating a prime office space, piling tons of papers on the desk and coming in to shuffle those papers a couple of times a week when she wasn't conducting field reviews.

She always operated under a different name when conducting the actual 'field reviews'.

But for most of the year, Sarah Walker disappeared from the face of the Earth entirely and, to fill the void created in the universe, another woman with a different name appeared, usually in some remote and dangerous location. Occasionally with a similar appearance but usually not. Sarah Walker was more comfortable than any of those assassins, thieves and seductresses. But Sarah Walker doesn't exist and using that name in front of this man leaves her feeling somehow exposed. Like she has already been caught in a lie.

She really just wants to size him up, determine if he's hiding a dangerous agent under this goofy, friendly persona. She's really good at that. She learned it at her father's knee long before the CIA got their hooks into her and her life often depends upon it. The geeks at the field office told her the phone fix they staged for her would probably take one of _these_ geeks 10 to 15 minutes to fix. She shouldn't need half that time. She doesn't get one tenth.

She had indulged herself for a second watching him delicately curl his lip around the already removed phone backing. He held it softly between his lips while he dexterously fiddled with a small screw driver in one hand and the remainder of the phone in the other. By the time her attention was back on his eyes they were staring right back at her as he handed the now fully-functional phone back to her. She estimated it took less than 20 seconds. And he had been distracted and babbling with part of a cell phone in his mouth all of those few seconds.

Now she was just starting to get irritated. But, after gently correcting her use of 'geek' versus 'nerd' - and she wasn't sure if it were a branding distinction of the store or any real, technical distinction - he just flashed that sweet smile and looked down at her. And maybe the fact that he _was_ looking down at her was part of what was getting on her nerves.

_Why'd he have to be so damn tall?_ Height was something she had always used as an advantage in her interactions with men. In her heels she was on eye level with most and towered over some and these borrowed shoes were lower than her preferred heels for something like this.

Her mind scrambled to maintain her dwindling advantage. _If I can get him to step off that riser I'll bet we'll be on the same level and...Oh..._

There was no riser.

He had simply stepped through the entry gap, walked around the circular desk and now stood directly in front of her. He was easily 6' 4" and their height difference was even more exaggerated now that they were so close to one another and he was looking down into her eyes with the most sincere smile she had ever seen.

She could smell the faint scent of some earthy-citrusy soap and felt warmth radiating off of him. Both his personality and actual, physical heat. He was tall and slim with not-very-muscular but still broad shoulders. He might even be imposing if he stood at his full height but he hunched slightly because keeping his eyes on the horizon would leave him looking over the heads of everyone and it only had the effect of making him seem more approachable.

She had the random thought - this seemed to be the day for it - that they would fit together perfectly if they danced. Not like Bryce. She wore flats or low heels as often as possible to avoid embarrassing him. Bryce wasn't short, in fact he was taller than average. But she was unusually tall and he always seemed self conscious about it.

This man had power to his presence though he didn't seem to know it. Maybe it was some sort of sales technique because he didn't seem like a trained agent - his attention was too focused on the task at hand - on her - rather than everything else going on around him. She was trying to find a concise way to describe him, so open and earnest, she reassessed that no matter how tall he stood he would never be imposing. He was too..._sweet_...for that.

When she approached the desk she had felt in control of the situation. She realized too late that she had somehow completely lost any advantage she may have had.

She sensed more than saw someone approaching out of the corner of her eye. How had Bartowski noticed the man and she hadn't? That wasn't entirely accurate; she had noticed but she had automatically classified the man as a harried customer and dismissed him as a potential threat. Bartowski may or may not have been coming around the desk to talk to her but his attention was now diverted to the frantic man now interrupting them. Where she saw only threats and non-threats and had already relegated the man to the grey faceless horde that didn't warrant her attention, Bartowski apparently saw someone who needed help.

And this man needed all kinds of help. He reminded her of why she didn't focus too much on the individuals that made up the world she was sworn to protect. What an idiot. Even she knew to check whether a device required a specific recording medium or not. Although she had likely used more different recording devices in her life than this guy even knew existed.

She had hoped that Bartowski - her target, she reminded herself - would hand the customer off to someone else and get back to her. He had seemed to consider doing just that for a moment but made the unexpected decision. At least he seemed to have done so slightly reluctantly. Maybe if he hadn't looked down at the little girl she would have stood a chance.

No one is this nice. Not that she's ever seen. Not only has he taken the time to help this father save a priceless memory - and likely his own ass if he had returned home empty handed - but he seems to be having a fantastic time doing it.

This is fun to him. She couldn't remember the last time she had experienced something she would describe as fun. Exhilarating and dangerous were her usual substitutes. And as much fun as he seems to be having it was also remarkably kind of him.

As she looked around at the racks of merchandise and carefully designed yet completely predictable advertisements she realized there probably aren't many opportunities to make these kinds of grand gestures. He's obviously smart and kind and he's probably bored out of his mind 99% of the time. He jumped at the opportunity to exercise some creativity to make a little girl feel like a princess. Not only did he jump at the opportunity, he left an attractive woman who was clearly throwing him all the right signs in order to do so. How many men had she met in her entire life that would make that choice?

Exactly zero until today.

He had rallied his troops in a matter of moments to recreate the little girl's dance recital. This was interesting. It was yet another facet of him. He was no less kind or polite but he was clearly in command here. She was reasonably certain that he didn't even realize that within moments - thanks to an Asian girl with heavy makeup dressed similarly to Bartowski except for the ridiculously short skirt - the conversation between he and the little ballerina was currently being broadcast on every screen in the store.

Morgan, as the shorter, bearded man in the green polo shirt had introduced himself moments ago, was directing traffic and clearing the scene as though he were a stage manager while directing the others to set up a second camera for a redundant recording. Two arguing men were attempting to set up music for the performance - one was young, short, thin and apparently of Indian descent; the other bigger and older with thinning hair and bleary eyes. Wires had apparently been crossed as the music was not yet audible but the video broadcast was currently complete with audio of the conversation between Bartowski and the little girl being carried over the store's PA system.

With all the chaos of his coworkers around them, Bartowski's attention was solely focused on the little girl. She had been on the verge of tears moments ago but now looked to be a combination of excited and scared that was very familiar to the government agent who had introduced herself as 'Sarah'. She smiled as she watched him patiently explain a few things to both father and daughter, ask a few questions of the father and generally fawn over the little girl. The longer he spoke the more excited and less scared the little girl seemed to be. It was the sweetest thing she had ever seen.

The broadcast of the conversation between Bartowski and the little girl over the PA had drawn the attention of the customers to the video wall. And the images of the tall man stooping down to speak to the little girl in a pink tutu and tights displayed on every screen on the wall of televisions had drawn a crowd of onlookers.

Bartowski seemed oblivious to his audience as he knelt down to reassure the little girl who was apparently unaccustomed to the spotlight as she explained _why_ she was never in the front at dance recitals.

And then he said it. For everyone in the store to hear.

The most beautiful lie she had ever heard: "Real ballerinas _are_ tall."

It hit too close to home. And she realized that in the last ten minutes she had mentally referred to a suspected terrorist as both adorable and sweet. This was _not_ going the way she had planned. He glanced over at her as though he had expected her to vanish. He smiled broadly when his eyes found hers and, when she smiled back at the overpowering and genuine warmth of it out of reflex rather than as a result of her training, she was shocked to realize that her pulse was higher than it had any right to be and she knew she had to get out of there.

Luckily, as he finished directing the impromptu solo ballet recital and thanking his colleagues for their help, her target was intercepted by a pompous coworker. She took the opportunity to extract one of her generic business cards from her borrowed purse, jotted a quick note and retreated to reassess her approach.

And the unexpected enigma that was Charles Irving Bartowski.

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* * *

.

When she arrived back at her hotel room she threw her borrowed purse down on the bed in violent frustration. Bryce must have tipped him off. How else could he have known that she, specifically, was coming for him? Maybe they planned for multiple contingencies. And she cursed Bryce for revealing all those things he knew would bring up unsettling memories and throw her off her game. That was the only possible explanation and she was livid.

Her father. Vicki Vale. Real ballerinas are tall. That quiet stubborn confidence and presence he had underneath the stumbling facade.

As she closed her eyes and performed a couple of deep breathing exercises she was able to calm herself. She then realized that she herself had conjured up the memory of her father with a poor choice of words before she ever interacted with Bartowski.

The bearded guy in the green polo shirt was the one who brought up Vicki Vale and she couldn't fathom Bryce bringing in a third conspirator let alone one who worked in the same store as Bartowski. Multiple operatives working covers in the same retail store were bound to draw unwanted attention.

The fact that she was naturally attracted to tall men and the way he had used his physical presence against her could have been contrived if he were a trained agent but she was pretty sure he was not. And Bryce's pride wouldn't have permitted pulling that particular lever.

And whatever else was going on she was relatively certain that the ballerina was not in on it.

There wasn't any real evidence that any of what had just happened was contrived in any way. And that unsettled her more than if the entire affair had been staged. If she had felt the way she had because someone was working an angle that she could identify she could assess and react. But to react to someone like that - for them to seem to know and understand so much about you having never met you before - was difficult to process. Yet a bewildered smile was threatening to overtake her face as she relived the brief interaction in her mind.

As she stood at the panoramic windows of her bedroom looking out over the city skyline she had managed to almost completely quell her anger and frustration. She was still unsettled but in a strangely unfamiliar calm and carefree way until she also realized that she had never told Bryce any of those things that had seemed too coincidental not to have been staged.

They had never shared anything like that about their true selves. Only lived for their next mission and it had seemed like happiness for a time. She realized she had been prepared to hear that he was dead ever since he went off grid nearly three months ago but this was the first quiet moment she had found to contemplate it since she had been informed that he was, in fact, dead.

She stared out the window at nothing in particular as the reality of it set in and she finally accepted that she would never see him again. That their adventures together were over. He had been the only consistent presence in her life recently and his now-permanent absence left her feeling somewhat adrift. But consistency was the only thing she would miss. She had somehow come to think of him as reliable when he had, in fact, proven himself to be anything but.

She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. She decided to put it out of her mind, shower quickly and take a brief but much-needed nap. She would allow herself two hours. Then she would turn her attention to preparing for a little old fashioned B and E. Hopefully tonight she would find what she had been sent here to find so she could push all these unsettling thoughts and feelings deep down where they belonged.

And then she can get the hell out of Burbank.

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* * *

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011: Twelve More Hours

Buy More Plaza; Thurs Sept 20, 2007 12:45 pm

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The agent currently going by the name Sarah Walker hated to fail at anything but the attempted retrieval of Bartowski's computer had been a mild disaster. The two friends from the Buy More had interrupted her and launched the most truly inept defense of personal property she could have possibly imagined. Bartowski's sidekick, as Sarah had come to think of the bearded coworker from the Buy More, had been the source of most of the damage inflicted on Bartowski himself - his attempted attacks providing her with ammunition that she easily deflected to collide with the taller man.

She smiled despite her frustration as she replayed the comedic sequence of events in her mind. If he were not the reason behind her visit to Burbank she would have felt sorry for him. Had he truly been an innocent bystander would so many of the deflected attacks have found their way into contact with the more sensitive parts of his body? It had been second nature but she suspected her uncanny aim and knowledge of the more vulnerable parts of the human anatomy had more than a little to do with it.

Bartowski was either very committed to a cover identity as a bumbling computer repair technician or was strictly an analyst for an unknown entity or other untrained resource that Bryce had trusted to transfer the Intersect programming. Based on his near complete absence of self-defense skills she suspected the latter. No matter how committed an agent was to a cover she could not fathom such a person so completely failing to protect themselves as Bartowski had the previous night.

She was surprised - and maybe a tiny bit insulted - that Bartowski hadn't taken the bait and called her. She knew she had an effect on him and tried to suppress the fact that the feeling had been somewhat mutual for reasons exceeding her ability to explain. She was on a clock and didn't really have time for him to be playing games trying not to look too eager.

She had assumed he would call that night - had waited for the call - right up until the other residents of his apartment had left for what looked like a date and given her an opportunity to break in. It was slightly unreasonable to think he would have called mere hours after meeting her. But to be completely honest with herself, that may have had a tiny contribution to the accuracy of her counter attacks last night.

But she had taken the time to finally get some sleep and gather herself and was now ready to reengage at his workplace. Bartowski had just arrived, walking from the Large Mart next door and looking somewhat frazzled, and she was briefing Graham on her progress. "I have eyes on him right now. And, like I said, the computer was destroyed. Beyond repair."

The physical damage was only part of the carnage. It honestly hadn't looked _that_ bad. She had tapped into the store's security cameras after her failed retrieval - breaking into the closed store and clipping in a basic transmitting device at a clearly labeled access panel. Disabling the store's minimal security and rigging the transmitter had been simple.

Even after doing so she had been surprised to see Bartowski bring in the damaged computer - potentially full of a treasure trove of government secrets - to a pair of his colleagues early this morning for a second and third opinion. From the same two men that had been hot wiring the store's public address system yesterday. Apparently they came as a bizarre pair. There was no sound but it was obvious from their body language that they thought the computer was a lost cause and they left the dismantled components completely unsecured in a back room.

She had later easily slipped in through the loading dock, snagged the discarded hard drive and dropped it off with the geeks - _nerds_, she involuntarily corrected herself - in the LA field office. She was surprised how quickly they had responded with their findings until they informed her there was nothing to find. The drive had been completely wiped and reformatted. The logical conclusion being that Bartowski had wiped it clean but then why the subterfuge of letting his coworkers examine it? Had they helped him hide the evidence? Had they put on this charade to fool her into thinking an unknown party had absconded with the data?

If Bryce had still been alive she would have suspected that he had beaten her to Bartowski and already retrieved the data. Perhaps he did have another unknown co-conspirator and that person had retrieved it. But, if so, why hadn't Bryce sent the information directly to that person?

Nothing was adding up and anything was possible but a preponderance of evidence was starting to lead her to believe that the man she had suspected of conspiring with Bryce was more likely another victim of Bryce's deceptions. And she was slowly becoming undeniably aware how ridiculous any theory she concocted to continue to implicate Bartowski truly was. But that still didn't answer the fundamental question of where the data had ended up.

"Okay. It's done. I want you in the air in an hour."

"But what if he has an external drive? A backup…" She really wanted to resolve this situation herself. It was the only way she saw to remove this cloud of suspicion that she herself was under. Whatever her former partner had done, if she could fix it, she could get her life back. Even if she wasn't sure what that meant anymore. And she really wanted to understand the connection between her target and Bryce. Other than both being by any definition attractive men they seemed like they could not have been more different.

"Its over, Sarah. The NSA is stepping in. Bryce was CIA, he was our guy. And he burned us. Casey's on his way out. You're being recalled."

"'Cause of Casey? He's a burnout."

An icy fist gripped her heart. NSA? Casey? _John_ Casey?

Casey wasn't an undercover operative like her. He couldn't be anymore, at least not under that name. He was notorious. He used to be clandestine but later became too well known within the agencies for leading highly effective strike teams around the world. He was also rumored to perform the occasional solo incursion but those weren't undercover ops per se. They were strictly infiltration and assassination. With the exception of a whisper and a shadow of some possible involvement in a mess in Costa Gravas he was never seen. If John Casey was coming for you, you were already dead.

This kid really was in deep shit.

Her initial reaction was competitive in nature. She wanted to close this out and remove the stain her former partner had left on the whole situation. Furthermore, she wanted to get the best of Casey. A former teammate had crossed paths with him before and told her what a jerk he was. But she also shuddered to think of Chuck having to deal with such a man. If Chuck was just a pawn in Bryce's game she couldn't think of anyone who would care less that Chuck was caught up in a situation not of his own making than Major John Casey.

Casey was supposed to be out of the game. Retired. Rumor was he had gone off the reservation a while back and taken on some sort of a rogue mission that the State Department and various intelligence agencies were extremely unhappy about. One that had resulted in the deaths of several CIA agents. But he was completely loyal to General Beckman of the NSA and apparently she returned that loyalty. She had shielded Casey from whatever fallout he had created.

Beckman had taken a lot of flak for it but it had been an excellent investment of her political capital although it had not appeared so at the time. Now that she was Director of the NSA, it meant Beckman had a personal attack dog that rivaled the armies of some small nations. Sarah still wanted to straighten this out herself but she also suddenly felt an odd need to make sure Chuck wasn't harmed in the process. Graham's next words on the subject of John Casey only intensified that need.

"He's a killer, Sarah. Cold school. Whatever happened with Bryce, you couldn't have known. You couldn't have stopped."

Casey _was_ a killer. He was her.

And she knew what happened to people who got in _her_ way.

"But I can fix it. If there's a backup, I'll find it. Just give me twelve hours." She decided to ask for forgiveness later rather than permission now and disconnected before Graham could disagree. When he didn't call her back she took it as assent.

Moments later she walked up to the Nerd Herd desk for the second time in two days where Chuck was collapsed on his own folded arms. Whatever misery he currently thought he was feeling paled in comparison to the reality of his situation. Her earlier mix of amusement and frustration she had felt since last night was gone. It was clear to her now that whatever Bryce's motivations had been, Chuck Bartowski was an unwitting victim rather than an accomplice. And a stone cold killer was coming for him. Someone as dangerous as her.

She still needed to find out what had become of the Intersect but she felt her mission change regardless of what she had been ordered to do. She felt herself actually shiver as she made the conscious and extremely uncomfortable decision to trade her sword for a shield - at least for the time being.

She thought to herself that this was her last chance to back away. To turn around, walk out of the store, follow Graham's original orders and let Casey do whatever he had been ordered to do.

Protection details were the worst. She had been loaned out to the Secret Service for a while, ostensibly to conduct threat assessments, and that was the exception. There was always substantial intel, solid threat assessments and plenty of manpower. So much excess manpower that Graham had used the assignment as an opportunity to conveniently position her in various locales where he had need of her other skills. Her Secret Service duties weren't the only scouting she was doing and she always returned a few weeks or months later to put her plans into action.

Most protection details weren't positioned as well for success. They either turned out to be completely unnecessary assignments or you suddenly found yourself completely outmanned and outgunned. Yet the threat assessment always tended toward the average. The result was that when someone warranted the kitchen sink treatment from their enemies you were never entirely prepared. She had always compensated with superior planning and multiple contingencies. Even so, casualties on some of those lesser protection missions were unacceptably high.

And she herself was not necessarily the person you wanted protecting you. She hadn't survived this long due to a willingness to blindly sacrifice herself for anyone. The various protection details she had been involved in were brief because they had evolved from other missions. They generally consisted of protecting bad people turned informant or witness against other bad people. Certainly no one she would lament losing and her best efforts to protect such people might consist of eliminating any assailants but she wasn't taking a bullet for anyone like that.

Her role at the Secret Service was not the typical protective detail. Firstly, without seriously altering her appearance, she would have stood out too much and that would have tipped off the other agents that something was amiss. Graham had emphasized her planning capabilities in the context of thinking like a potential assailant. He hadn't advertised her full capabilities but who better to think like an assassin than an assassin?

So she found herself acting as an advance scout to secure the locations on the itineraries of those being physically protected by other more selflessly heroic agents. She had never been assigned to a detail as high-profile as heads of state or their families and the Secret Service hadn't put her directly in the line of fire protecting any of the politicians or foreign dignitaries assigned to her team.

She did find that she had some sense of duty and admiration for those other agents. She honestly wasn't sure how she herself would react if an American government leader were in danger. She liked to think she would have done the right thing - made the noble sacrifice - but she couldn't be sure. Maybe that's why she hated protection details. So much depended upon planning and the one thing she couldn't plan for was her uncertainty of her own nature.

And even with the best of plans, so many other things can go wrong. It was just so much easier to break things. If she were to learn that she was correct and Chuck was not, in fact, an enemy of the state she wondered how convincing she could be when she told him not to worry. That everything would be alright. That she would protect him. When it was far more likely that this would end very, very badly for one or both of them.

She looked at the unruly hair of the seemingly innocent man with his head buried in his arms. She deliberately stepped forward and felt an odd compulsion to reach out and stroke that mop of hair in some sort of comforting gesture.

But she abruptly stopped her hand halfway to its destination. Comforting people wasn't her strong suit any more than protecting them. She suddenly wished she had someone better suited to assign as his protector. But she was all he was going to get. She felt the earlier chill set into her bones as she made her decision.

She paused one last time after diverting her hand a foot to the left and letting it hover over the bell on the desk, inhaling deeply before she gently rang it with a single, hesitant tap of her index finger.

And she felt an unexpected and unfamiliar sensation - a strangely comforting warmth - erase the chill and overtake _her_ entire body when he blindly reached toward the bell and engulfed her deceptively delicate hand with his own.

.

* * *

END OF LINE

* * *

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A/N2: Yes, there was a time when 'midnight screening' meant movie theater employees cracked open new releases early and invited their friends to sneak in after hours. Money and/or beer often changed hands. When I tied Bryce to James Bond I had already intended to make Bryce an orphan but thought it was hilarious when I discovered that particular detail of Bond's history in common with my Bryce was revealed in the book 'You Only Live Twice'. And, no. Of course the CIA doesn't have a (disclosed) field office in Los Angeles. The CIA has no license to operate domestically so that would be very wrong of them, very wrong indeed! In related news...these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Song notes: It was unfair to make you search for those three artists/bands because two instances were not blatant references. _Disarm You With_ a Smile by Smashing Pumpkins is the obvious one of the three as the title of Ch 10. The Bon Jovi reference is simply to the names of two characters in Ch 8 (Piece of Cake) - _Livin' On a Prayer_ was the first thing that came to mind when I arbitrarily named one 'Tommy' and then needed a name for his girlfriend. From there, only one name was possible. Ignoring timing, maybe these were their high school jobs? The Ani DiFranco reference actually has no _direct_ reference whatsoever but Ch 7 (This Mortal Coil) has some thematic references to her song _Gravel_ and in my mind at least portions of the song fit Bryce, and what I perceive to be Sarah's somewhat toxic 'relationship' with him, extremely well. It won't be the last time I refer to a song of hers...

Do NOT be alarmed when you see the word count for the next installment! Like this installment it is broken into five chapters for your summertime reading convenience. Be sure to tune in to find out what else Sarah was thinking after Chuck fixed her phone and before he started defusing bombs with computer viruses.


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